In the 1980s follies played a part in promoting a new breakfast cereal: special packs of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain contained picture cards featuring ‘Gardens to Visit’. The twenty cards were illustrated with views of gardens in Britain and Ireland, all of them open to the public, and five follies or quirky garden ornaments were among the cards to be collected. As the blurb on the box announced ‘Most of us are enchanted by the magic of a beautiful garden’.
Tower Folly, Fairseat, Meopham, Kent
It is common today to see former Oast Houses, originally built to dry hops, converted into chic Kentish dwellings. The Waterlow family of Trosley Towers, near Wrotham, are credited with being amongst the first to see the capabilities of such redundant structures when, in 1903, they converted an oast house on their estate. Half a century later the building was renamed Tower Folly, and became home to experiments in sound.
The Porch, Bourne Hill Gardens, Salisbury, Wiltshire.
In the last years of the eighteenth century, Shute Barrington, Bishop of Salisbury, commissioned James Wyatt to carry out repairs to Salisbury Cathedral. In an act that would be described as ‘outrageous’ by later generations, Wyatt removed an ancient porch. The Dean and Chapter, recognising that prominent citizen Henry Penruddocke Wyndham knew how to ‘appreciate such curious monuments of antiquity’, presented him with the ‘elegant remnant’ which he re-erected as a feature in his garden.
The Seat on the Mount, Holkham, Norfolk
In the 1740s William Kent designed a new garden ornament for Thomas Coke of Holkham. An artificial hillock was constructed on which the temple was to stand, giving it the name the Seat on the Mount. The temple was later pulled down, but fragments of the four busts which once decorated it were salvaged, and incorporated into a cottage in a nearby village. The Flâneuse has written about follies built from the remnants of houses, but a cottage decorated with the remnants of a garden temple is something new.
‘Features and Follies’ of Scotland
Hubert Walter Wandesford Fenwick, architect turned architectural historian and writer, was a regular contributor to The Scots Magazine, a monthly publication that claims to be the oldest magazine in Britain still in publication, having been launched in 1739. In 1965 Fenwick wrote an article about ‘Features and Follies’, in Scotland, illustrated with his own very attractive colour sketches.
Leith Hill Tower, near Dorking, Surrey.
The tower on Leith Hill was erected in the 1760s by Richard Hull. The hillside wasn’t actually his property, but his home was nearby and he leased the plot from the landowners, the Evelyn family of nearby Wotton. It became a popular attraction and in 1790 it was said that the view from the tower was ‘esteemed equal, if not superior, to any in the kingdom’. Hull was so fond of his tower that he designated it as his mausoleum.
‘The Gateway’, Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire
The Flâneuse recently puzzled over this black and white photograph of a tall archway that is annotated ‘Breedon-on-the-Hill’. Internet searches using every combination of the village name with ‘arch’, ‘gate’ and ‘folly’, and as many other ideas as the Flâneuse could come up with, drew a complete blank. But driving into the village there it was, just to our right, and unchanged since the older photograph was taken.
A little way further along the wall from the gateway three letters are created from a patchwork of stone blocks near the entrance to a busy quarry. They abbreviate the former name of the works, the Breedon and Cloud Hill Lime Works Company: Breedon has been the site of quarrying and lime extraction since the eighteenth-century.
Aerial photographs of the quarry, taken in the middle of the twentieth century, show the gateway standing in what appears to be a bare plot, but it is still not immediately clear what purpose the arch serves.
Happily the excellent Breedon-on-the-Hill parish website has links to two volumes of pictorial history which explain that the ‘gateway’ was the centrepiece of a rockery, one of a number built by the owner of the quarry to beautify the village. By the late 1950s the village had become known for these rockery gardens of ‘artistic stonework’ which were planted with flowers and full of ‘vital colour’. According to the history, much of the rockwork was created freehand by Lawrence Wakefield, although the archway is not specifically attributed to him.
For much of the twentieth century the quarry was owned and/or managed by the Shields family. In 1959 Captain C.F. Shields, Managing Director of the works, told a reporter from the Leicester Evening Mail that providing good houses for workers, and ornamenting the village, was ‘making a return’ for ‘despoiling the rock that gives the village its name and character’. And of course the stonework was a great advertisement for the company’s products which included ‘rockery and grotto stone’.
Through the archway, which stands on the village’s Main Street, are steps leading up to the quarry offices, although sadly they now terminate in a ‘keep out’ sign.
If visiting Breedon-on-the-Hill don’t miss the village’s other attractions which include an eighteenth century lockup and the very pleasing War Memorial to those lost in the First and Second World Wars.
Take time to explore the church of St Mary and St Hardulph, which stands high above the village close to the quarry face (it is just out of shot in the aerial photo’ – it stands on the plateau above the quarry face on the right). As well as important Anglo-Saxon sculpture there are also fine tombs, including a vast monument to Sir George Shirley and his family, dated 1598, which features this intricate life-size memento mori.
Thank you for reading and do please get in touch if you know more about the arch, or would like to share any thoughts. The comments box can be found at the foot of the page.
P.S. A well-known landscape ornament has been in the news this week and deserves a mention. Beckford’s Tower, near Bath, won the Award for Restoration of a Georgian Building in a Landscape at the Georgian Group Architectural Awards 2025. Congratulations to all the team at the Bath Preservation Trust
The Tower, Chinthurst Hill, Wonersh, Surrey
In 1938 readers of the Surrey Advertiser were baffled by an announcement that the Earl of Inchcape was seeking permission to build a ‘Martello Tower’ on his Chinthurst Hill estate. Following up on a notice published the previous week, the paper felt the need to explain to its readers what a Martello Tower was. The article described the purpose of the defensive towers that had appeared during the Napoleonic wars, and the writer then concluded that ‘it seems improbable that Lord Inchcape’s proposed tower will be exactly similar to the coastal originals’.
The Arch, Brookmans Park, Little Heath, Hertfordshire
This fine brick arch is one of the few surviving eighteenth century features of the designed landscape of Gobions in Hertfordshire. The mansion is long gone, and much of the park has been developed for housing and a golf course, but the arch still stands – although it has come very close to collapse.
The Tower, Rookesbury, Hampshire
In 1826 Charles Heathcote Tatham exhibited a view of a ‘tower now erecting’ at the Royal Academy. The tower was a belvedere, eye-catcher and summerhouse on the Rookesbury estate, near Wickham, where a substantial new house, also designed by Tatham, was under construction.