Country house parties & glamorous guests
NORTHERN LIGHT
Shetland's fire festivals
A luxury stay in beautiful Wales
ROYAL SCANDALS
Family feuds & secret romances
Cosy winter retreats
Art Deco gems of London
Meet the bell ringers
Moor& More
It has a landscape and a history of peaks and troughs, but a visit to Dartmoor National Park in Devon has far more ups than downs
WORDS JENNY ROWE-PATEL
The 13th -century Clapper Bridge over the East Dart River, at Postbridge
The real JANE AUSTEN
Her novels are some of the best-loved in the English language, but what do we know of Jane Austen herself? On the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth, we look back on her short life and her lasting legacy
WORDS NEIL JONES
During the cold winter of 1775, at the rectory in Steventon in Hampshire, a chubby-faced, dark-eyed baby girl was born whose life would later be popularly characterised as uneventful. But that is not quite true.
Jane Austen grew up to see four of her now worldfamous novels published – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma – while Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and the unfinished Sanditon appeared posthumously. Also adapted for countless TV, film and stage dramas, her works are celebrated for their wit, irony and sharp social observations, not least on courtship and marriage. But what of Jane’s own life?
Born 250 years ago, on 16 December 1775, the second daughter and seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra, Jane was surrounded by a creative, lively family. From 1783 to 1786 she was sent to boarding schools in Oxford, Southampton and Reading with her beloved older sister, also named Cassandra, a time during which she narrowly escaped death from typhus fever.
Jane’s formal education ended when she was 11 years
old, but, a voracious reader, she had the run of her father’s library at home, and with her siblings revelled in games, theatricals and writing. The Austens took in boys (the oldest around 14 to 15) and ran a small school to supplement the reverend’s clerical income alongside their small farm.
Jane had inherited her mother’s clever wit and love of words, and perhaps the boyish bustle in the house rubbed off on her too. Certainly, the stories she wrote in her late childhood and teens (some now held by the British Library in London and Oxford’s Bodleian Library) burst with anarchic, all-action scenes. Young people, particularly girls, encourage each other to “disentangle themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority”; they get drunk, eat too much, steal money, get into fights; there are murders and a girl’s face turns “as White as Whipt syllabub” when her intended husband is killed. The stories mock girls’ limited educations and expectations, as well as literary fashions like slow-moving, long-winded novels-in-letters.
Jane wrote her tales to entertain family and friends, dedicating them to nearest-and-dearest like her sister, “the beautifull [sic] Cassandra”, and her adored older cousin Eliza who probably inspired her love of piano
Far from demure, the stories Jane wrote in her late childhood and teens burst with anarchic, all-action scenes
The British royal family is rarely off the newspaper front pages. But present-day royal news stories pale into insignificance compared to the scandals of centuries past: a series of family feuds, secret marriages, illicit relationships and even murder.
Unsurprisingly, many of these historical scandals took place within the refined rooms of royal residences. One such place is Kensington Palace in West London. The birthplace of Queen Victoria, it’s perhaps best known today as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but in 1710 the palace was the site of one of the most infamous break-ups in royal history.
The then monarch Queen Anne had an intense relationship with her childhood friend Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. It’s unclear whether this was sexual or just passionately platonic, but their relationship began to sour over political differences and Anne’s growing affection for her chambermaid Abigail Masham. Abigail, who was Sarah’s distant cousin, had been brought into the queen’s household after falling on hard times. It was this love triangle that loosely inspired the darkly comic film The Favourite.
As tensions grew between the pair, Sarah threatened to publish intimate letters that the queen had sent her. Anne finally confronted Sarah at Kensington Palace. The exact room where the encounter took place was likely lost during palace renovations. But it was into the King’s Gallery – still intact and impossibly grand – that
Though rumours dogged Queen Anne, it wasn’t until after her death that Sarah got her revenge by writing a scandalous memoir
Previous page, clockwise from top:
This page, left to right: The White Hart Hotel, St Albans; Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland; the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
Sarah supposedly fled following their explosive row. It’s an appropriately dramatic location for such an event: stretching the length of a swimming pool, the room is lined with giant windows on one side that now look out onto the manicured lawns of Kensington Gardens and the London skyline in the distance. Its dramatic red damask wallpaper and lavish painted ceiling were introduced by Anne’s successor George I, but for a sense of how the palace would have looked during her reign, you can head to the ‘Queen’s Apartments’, which still retain the less ostentatious look of the late 17th century.
Though rumours dogged the queen during her lifetime, it wasn’t until after her death that Sarah got her revenge, releasing a memoir that painted a highly unflattering portrait of her erstwhile friend.
When the queen died, the crown passed to her second cousin, George I (though Anne was pregnant 18 times, sadly none of her children survived). This ushered in what later became known as the Georgian era –arguably the most scandalous period in royal history.
One of those scandals took place in the White Hart Hotel in the city of St Albans. This former coaching inn dates back to 1470 and still retains its original blackand-white facade, low ceilings and well-worn wooden beams. More recent touches nod to its Tudor heritage; there are a couple of giant velvet thrones, a glass case of regal figurines, and the ceiling is painted oxblood-red and stencilled with gold fleur-de-lis.
The inn sits on what, in the 18th century, was a busy thoroughfare that travellers would pass through on
The King’s Gallery, Kensington Palace; Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough; Queen Anne
FIRE & FOLKLORE
The Shetland isles have a long and rich history of folklore and storytelling, culminating in winter’s dramatic fire festival, which celebrates the islands’ Viking roots
WORDS LAURIE GOODLAD
Sitting on Britain’s frayed Atlantic edge, Shetland is a place of boundaries; of sea and sky, myth and legend, light and darkness. Geographically closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to London, Shetland is the most northerly point of Britain: the end of the road.
Proudly standing apart, both culturally and physically, from the rest of Britain, the inhabited islands – 16 of the hundred or so that make up this far-flung archipelago – have a deeply rooted culture that sets them ablaze in the depths of its northern winter.
Shetland has long been a place of storytelling, and the islands’ folklore was born from tales told around a smouldering peat fire on long winter nights. In winter, the faraway sun burns low in the sky for just six short hours before slipping under the horizon, cloaking the islands in blackness once more.
Folklore tells of the mythical creatures that inhabit this landscape: of the little people, known as trows, who live on the moor, sometimes malevolent, but more often mischievous; and njuggles, who pull unsuspecting souls to a watery grave on winged-horse backs in bogs and burns. Then there’s the selkies, who can shapeshift from seals and take human form to live on the land, and mermaids who, beguilingly beautiful, seduce both men and giants.
The landscape inspires these characters, from the vast swathes of
Previous page: Up Helly Aa, Lerwick This page, clockwise from right: Children and young people play a role in the festivals too; the Heads of Groken, Shetland; Fair Isle knitwear; Lerwick Harbour; Jarlshof Prehistoric and Norse Settlement
rugged hills and inland lochs to the sweeping expanse of interior moorland that glows beneath the dance of the northern lights, to the coastal fringes where towering cliffs, sea stacks and caves break the perpetual assault from the North Atlantic during the darkest and stormiest days of winter.
Shetlanders have long clung to their heritage, and you’ll struggle to find the ubiquitous stereotypes of Scotland here. Haggis, kilts and bagpipes are replaced with bannocks (a type of scone), Fair Isle knitwear and fiddle music. Shetland is a place that dances to its own rhythm.
In its history, too, it stands apart from the rest of Scotland, of which it has been a part for only 550 years. Rather than the clan heroes and bloody battles that loom large in Scottish history, Shetland’s story is one of Viking warriors and seafarers. In 1469, King Christian I of Denmark gave Shetland to Scotland as part of a wedding dowry, bringing 600 years of Norse rule to a close. However, the islands are much older than this, and the first farmers to settle here arrived some 5,000 years ago.
The islands’ folklore was born from tales told around a smouldering peat fire on long winter nights
The story of Shetland’s people is best explored at Jarlshof Prehistoric and Norse Settlement on the southern tip of the Mainland, just a stone’s throw from towering Sumburgh Head, with its historic lighthouse and foghorn, whose deafening blast is sounded to mark the onset of winter. From here, you can gaze out across the Roost, where the North Sea and
