The Telegraph Magazine
13 March 2010
Jasper Conran's Country: exclusive extracts and photographs
Jasper Conran spent a year travelling around rural England, meeting the people keeping ancient crafts and traditions alive. His observations are collected in his evocative new book. Photographs by Andrew Montgomery.
This is an extract from 'Country’ by Jasper Conran.
'Country’ is an idea – a texture, a flavour, a state of mind. Close your eyes, and imagine the English countryside. What do you see or hear, smell, feel or taste? It might be a sweep of beautiful landscape or the warmth of a roaring pub fire; perhaps a porch filled with dripping coats and muddy wellingtons, the scent of ripe apples and freshly baked bread, or the hum of bees in a sleepy kitchen garden.
I wanted to celebrate that idea; to attempt to capture in words and photographs some of the many threads that, woven together, make up some of the fabric of the English countryside. To record the people and events I found during a year of exploration. The fact that I am a designer who has worked all his life with fabric, form and colour does not make me an expert on rural affairs but, when it comes to appreciating part of the texture of the English countryside, I think it may have helped.
Our world is being transformed, not only by globalisation but also by urbanisation. For the first time in history, more people live in towns and cities than in the countryside. Across the globe we are forgetting our rural roots, but country life, its values and people have never had more to offer. This is not about some imagined past, but life as it is lived today, in all its wonderful complexity. I worry these treasures can be all too easily lost. In some countries, grey urban landscapes merge from one city to the next. I hope something similar does not happen here.
Human beings were never meant to live too far away from nature. We become depressed and bewildered if we stay in our cities for too long, alienated from the seasons, cut off from nature and uprooted from the soil. I have nothing against change or modernity. Supermarkets, roads and new housing all bring great benefits, in the right measure. The countryside needs innovation and investment. It also needs us to appreciate what is already there. During my travels around rural England collecting impressions of what I like, I have observed a delicate balance of man-made and natural beauty, of old and new, and wild and tame.
The countryside belongs to all of us, or rather I should say, it belongs to none of us. It is merely entrusted to our keeping, to be tended, watered, nurtured and handed on to the following generations in good condition. We need to cherish it.
The chicken-keeper, Halstock, Dorset
People find beauty in many things and express their creativity in many different ways, not just on a grand scale. One of the aspects of the countryside that means so much to me is the presence of animals and the way they bring a different perspective to the world, rather than simply the human one.
In Dorset, as a sideline from his main employment as a landscape gardener, Andrew Dodge looks after chickens alongside a few cows in a rented orchard in Halstock. Andrew has never wanted to do anything except keep chickens. Even as a small boy, he was fascinated by them.
The mushroom-picker, Surrey
Of course, not everything that grows in the countryside is cultivated, and a grand day out need not involve an organised event. Nature has her own pride and joys and there are those who know the secret places where they are to be found.
On a warm autumnal morning in an undisclosed location in Surrey, Dante Leonelli, a local artist, shows us where to find penny bun mushrooms, also known as ceps or Boletus edulis. They are the bread-and-butter of foraging: easy to find, easy to identify and easy to cook – they are particularly delicious sliced and grilled. As well as mushrooms, which should always be approached with caution, there is plenty more to forage including nuts, berries, nettles, dandelions, snails, chickweed and sloes. An experienced forager such as Dante can amass a whole larder of wild-grown delicacies, particularly in the autumn.
The potter, Marshwood Vale, Dorset
In Dorset I revisited a house in the Marshwood Vale, set in an idyllic spot on the edge of a hamlet surrounded by endless woods and valleys. It is spectacular in late spring when the woods glow with bluebells, but I love, at any time of the year, to look in on one particular outbuilding: a converted dairy shed in which a local potter, Tim Hurn, pursues his craft. There is a particular atmosphere about the smell of clay, the warmth from the firing and the neat stacks of wood piled up for his huge brick kiln. It is a single-chamber 'anagama’ kiln, which he built himself.
He fires it four or five times a year, and it takes two to three days just to pack his pots into the firing chamber and another two to build up the fire, gradually loading it with more and more wood as the temperature increases. It can reach as high as 1,300C and takes four days to cool down. 'A few people from the village normally come and lend a hand,’ he says. 'It can be pretty tough work.’
Tim, who has been working here for 20 years, lives in a cottage nearby. When he isn’t potting, he works on the landlord’s estate, 'looking after sheep, hedge-laying, cider making – that sort of thing’. He feels that there is a strong link between his work and the landscape. 'I use local clay. The kiln is fired with local wood. And, in the end, I’m keeping to a tradition of English pottery that has been going on for generations. I think there’s a certain romance in the process.’
Community apple press, Henstridge, Somerset
As the tide of autumn continues to rise, those of us lucky enough to be out and about in the countryside can sense its rich scent. In barns and storerooms there is that lovely, hard-to-define atmosphere of fresh produce, perhaps strings of onions hung up to dry, the earthy smell of newly dug potatoes or the honeyed scent of apples stored on wooden shelves to ripen and mature.
Walking down a country lane you can tell, simply by smell, what is ready to be harvested. In Dorset and Somerset, autumn is (in Chaucer’s phrase) 'heavy with apples’. Many people have apple trees; some a whole orchard but, more often, just one or two trees. The trouble, if it can be called that, is that too many apples ripen at once. It is not possible to eat or cook them fast enough, even if you love them. Nor can you give them away. Everyone else is overwhelmed by plenty, too.
In my part of the West Country, we have a community apple press on a nearby farm. It is run by a formidable woman called Patricia Thompson (at one point in her colourful life, she was a newsreader in Senegal) and has made a real difference to the lives of small-scale apple growers in the area. Rather than regretting the apples rotting in our gardens, sheds and kitchens, we take them over to Patricia in the village of Henstridge, just across the border in Somerset, and turn them into apple juice. It is wonderfully straightforward. After a few hours in her barn, chopping and pressing, you have enough juice, tasting of apples just plucked from the tree, to last for the rest of the year.
Patricia runs the press, but the local residents bought it. As so often happens in such enterprises, the collective initiative is a boost to local morale. In recent years, many community shops, several hundred across the country, have sprung up to compensate for the decline of the village shop. Publicly owned pubs are a more recent variation on the same idea. It is reassuring to know that, by acting together, you can make a difference to your lives.
There is a life-enhancing quality about going to the farm and seeing Patricia at work. The atmosphere is rich with autumnal smells: the homelyold barn, the wooden shelves, the muddy floor, the boxes of apples waiting to be pressed. Ripeness seems to permeate the air. The sight of Patricia working so serenely brings to mind Thomas Hardy’s description of the woodsman Giles Winterbourne in The Woodlanders: 'He looked and smelt like autumn’s very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as cornflowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples.’
Rush-harvesting, Great Ouse, Bedfordshire
One misty summer’s morning, at a willow-fringed bend in the Great Ouse in Bedfordshire, I went to watch my friend gathering bulrushes. She looks like a river goddess who has just emerged from the waters. Her name is Felicity Irons, and she is engaged in the ancient craft of rush-harvesting. Using a 6ft pole with a long, sharp blade on the end, she leans into the rushes, slices them away at riverbed level, waits for them to float to the surface, then gathers them on to her 17ft punt. She has been doing it for years, having learnt from a harvester who used to work this stretch of river. She is one of the last practitioners of the craft in England and spends most of the summer harvesting and storing the rushes in a barn, then devotes the rest of the year to turning them into sweet-scented matting and other products.
'I love it,’ she says. 'You see the most extraordinary things – kingfishers, grass snakes – and at the end of the day you have a wonderfully satisfying feeling of knowing you’ve done a really good day’s work.’
Horse fair, Stow-on-the-Wold
There is romance in keeping old rural traditions alive. Every May tens of thousands of travellers and gipsies from all over Britain and Ireland gather at Stow-on-the-Wold for the first of three great annual horse fairs. The gathering is centuries old; the charter authorising it dates back to 1476. Others take place at Appleby in June and back at Stow in October. I am not sure everyone in Stow welcomes the arrival of the travellers. You sense a certain uneasiness lingering behind the shutters of closed shops as crowds of boisterous travellers flood the streets with the loud high spirits of fans approaching a football stadium. But those who venture into the grassy bowl to the southeast of the town where the fair is held are rewarded by an unforgettable spectacle of communal exuberance.
There is loud music, louder voices, swirling crowds of old and young, stalls selling shameless tat ('Chanel’ plates, 'Dior’ towels, even a 'Crown Derby full-length mink gown’). There are litters of puppies and rabbits for sale, as well as toys and trinkets, ice-cream and canned drinks, the noise and bustle mingling with the scents of hot dogs, cigarettes, cheap perfume and horse. Young and old paddle side by side through the mud, oblivious to any notion of a generation gap. There are men and women in mud-coloured coats and caps, swaggering boys in sagging jeans and beautiful girls in impossibly short skirts. Everyone seems to know each other or, in many cases, to be related.
Every now and then, beyond the bustle, you see traces of an older, simpler culture. Old men sell and buy fire-blackened pots and pans, which they weigh in their hands with a connoisseur’s touch; a woman slices hunks of bread in mid-air and feeds them straight into her toddlers’ mouths. There are glimpses inside exotic wagons, and horses standing patiently in the gaps between stalls and vans, or grazing placidly while their owners and buyers discuss their virtues and shortcomings.
Everyone appears completely relaxed. When a young man driving a sulky (a two-wheeled horse-drawn cart) comes clattering at breakneck speed towards a group of young mothers, they barely glance up as they shift their buggies out of his path.
Nearby, two men are trying to coax a giant piebald horse with a foolish fringe into a horsebox not much bigger than the horse itself. Each time it makes it halfway up the ramp, it hesitates, waves a hoof in the air and tiptoes backward. The ritual continues for 10 minutes or more. The man leading from the front is extremely patient, encouraging it with the gentlest of arms laid on its shoulder. It is impossible not to be struck by both his tenderness and courage. If the horse had panicked, the man would have been trapped and trampled.
Gipsies with their horses, Appleby, Cumbria
Rambling through the English countryside, you can never go far without encountering some sight or experience that floods the heart with hope. It could be a breathtaking view, a wonderful smell or a snatched glimpse of a wild creature; perhaps, even, a beautiful house glimpsed suddenly from an unexpected angle.
I thought I might see gipsies in Appleby in Cumbria in June for the annual horse fair, and expected them to be showing off their horses, but not in a deep, fast-flowing river. Yet there they were, at a bend in the River Eden, riding into the deep waters to prove the horses were strong enough to swim with riders on their backs.
There are those who disapprove of this practice, but it is dramatically evocative of a culture very different to the mainstream hi-tech so many of us assume is the only reality. It was a glimpse of a wilder world, both unsettling and stunning at the same time. One young man seemed centaur-like in his effortless rapport with the horse beneath him, while the whole scene – bridge and boy reflected in the cool waters as the old trees cast mysterious shadows around them – looked like some kind of Pre-Raphaelite painting.
