Some recent conversations have set me thinking about the farms around Staunton, how they’ve changed in my lifetime and are set to change again. When the twelfth Earl Ferrers put the estate up for auction in 1954 it included eight tenanted farms. The biggest had 266...
Have we ever seen a more glorious spring? I don’t recall one, and that not because we have more leisure to enjoy it. The miserably wet winter has resulted in a profusion of wild flowers, blooming earlier and more abundantly than ever. Now, paradoxically, the warm...
‘May you live in interesting times’, a Chinese saying for a Chinese virus. A strange time indeed. Staunton has been almost as quiet as when I first walked through the grounds exactly seventy years ago. We have not closed the car park or foothpaths, and in the last few...
Very strange times. As a boy I spent many nights in our damp cold cellar, sheltering from German bombers; now I’m confined to the kitchen, but at least it’s warm. Here at Staunton we are adjusting to the new reality. The Nurseries are fully open while at the Ferrers...
Some of the coal seams which give Coalville its name come to surface on our estate. They have been mined continually since medieval times; the last pit, New Lount, was sunk in 1927. All the deep mines had closed by about 1980, but they kept on pumping the mine water...
‘Parkinson’s Laws’ – does anybody remember them? One was, ’Work expands according to the amount of time available for its completion’. Well, I’ll add another: ‘The bigger the company, the harder it is to contact them’. Take the Forestry Commission, now called...
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