Apples are at the heart of the English countryside experience
Sir Roger Scruton is England's most charmingly selfdeprecating philosopher and polemicist, he is admired from Swindon to Kolkata, he specialises in aesthetics with a particular affection for music and architecture, which includes the landscape he inhabits in Wiltshire. Last weekend Sir Roger and Lady Scruton opened their home Sunday Hill Farm to host The Apple Festival. This festival combined the myriad virtues of the apple with some philosophy about country living from Sir Roger and his family.
Sir Roger still believes in the rural idyll and promotes a flourishing rural economy; the festival celebrated the small scale businesses and entrepreneurs of his local countryside with stalls selling local cheeses, jams and cordials, homemade cakes, cider, organic vegetables, heritage trees and paintings of horses. The apple of the celebration's eye was a display of some of England's 1,200 native apples.In England we have an expression “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”; most children take an apple to school in their lunchbox and it is true from Poland to Afghanistan apples are reputed to be an effective remedy for many gastroenterological problems.
Sir Roger spoke about how traditional farming methods have curated the hedgerows, copses and grassy meadows that have become synonymous with our idea of the countryside, he believes everyone is inspired by beauty, he quoted from literature and the Old Testament to support this, insisting that the beauty of the English countryside is distinguished amongst all of the landscapes in Europe. He explained that it is an inherent human desire to find a beautiful landscape to settle in and contrive a source of income from to pass on to one's children, the expectation is they will do the same. He referenced the EU's interference with this, in that agribusiness depends on subsidies that only have an economic interest, which disregards the aesthetic interest that binds the family together. Sir Roger disparaged the packaging, regulations and uniformity that supermarkets bring and he praised the role that C20th intellectuals and volunteers have played in lobbying to keep the green belt green. As small farms are no longer selfsustaining he advised farmers to combine compatible small scale businesses to their livelihoods, such as farmers markets, haulage enterprises or making alternative use of their farm's barns. Later on Sir Roger's sister in law Rose Prince, acclaimed food writer and cook, gave a mouth-watering cooking-with-apples demonstration, pointing out how good they taste in savoury dishes. Finally Elizabeth Hodder, Sir Roger's sister, spoke on the history of apples from Roman times until now. She talked of the many beliefs that are attached to apples particularly between lovers, among children, and to celebrate the birth of a new child.
As the sun went down on the autumnal pallet of the Wiltshire countryside the audience of country folk and their dogs listened contentedly to the harmonies of the local countryamericana band Newton Country, giving Sir Roger's endearing concept of a bucolic arcadia new life, his take home message was “Beauty actually matters, if you embrace this, it makes your life matter too”.
He still believes in the rural idyll and promotes a flourishing rural economy; the festival celebrated the small scale businesses and entrepreneurs of his local countryside.