In 1848 a brief note in local newspapers announced that a ‘lofty tower’ had been erected on Farleigh Down. Commanding the ‘most extensive and magnificent prospects’, the tower was built by Wade Browne, who had recently settled at Monkton Farleigh. The tower stands in Wiltshire – although very close to the border with Somerset.
The Jungle, Swinethorpe, Lincolnshire
Early in the nineteenth century, Samuel Russell Collett moved to a farming estate at Swinethorpe in Lincolnshire. There he constructed a ‘romantic seat’, in the form of a sham castle, which by 1824 was known by the curious name of ‘The Jungle’.
Pagoda and Bridge, Hythe, Hampshire
In December 1888, a ‘good property of modest pretensions’, with about 30 acres, was offered for sale near Hythe, on the Hampshire coast. Forest Lodge was marketed as a ‘most enjoyable residence for a yachtsman’ and was purchased as a country base by John Beach Fleuret, a London auctioneer and noted sailor. Fleuret immediately set to work remodelling the house and ornamenting the grounds. The major feature was a lake with a boathouse and bridge, both in a Chinese style. The only reminder today is a couple of blurry, but invaluable, photographs.
The Automobile Association and Follies
In 1950 the Automobile Association (A.A.) published a handbook for drivers which included maps and a gazetteer of the towns and villages of England and Wales (Scotland had its own association). As post-war paper shortages eased, a new expanded edition was published in 1958 which included illustrations of the sites a motorist might expect to see as they travelled sedately along the roads of Britain (as the maps make clear the motorway network was then at a very early stage of development). Alongside the churches, monuments, castles, historic pubs, chalk figures and gibbets there are more than thirty follies for the driver to spot along his way.
Angram Dam in miniature, Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire.
Courtesy of Nidderdale Museum.
Most of the structures featured in these pages decorate vast estates or landscapes, or at least substantial gardens. But the sculpture pictured here is something a little different – it started life as a project for men building a reservoir, and later spent many years ornamenting a quiet garden in a Yorkshire village. It is a scale model of the dam and valve tower at Angram Reservoir, north of Pateley Bridge in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, and was built by two of the masons who worked on the construction of the reservoir.
Follyphilia.
In November 1960, The Queen magazine published a special issue that asked the question ‘What’s so different about the British?’ Amongst the contributors were Norman Parkinson on ‘British Clothes’, Ambrose Heath on the British and cooking and Laurie Lee on the village of Slad. And what could be more British than follies, the subject discussed by Nicholas Guppy, and illustrated in wildly extravagant fashion by cartoonist ffolkes.
Portobello Tower, Hilton Hall, Staffordshire
Travellers on the M6 might have called in to Hilton Services to break their journey. Few will know that only a few fields away stands a tall prospect tower, although they may have caught a glimpse of it from the motorway. The belvedere was built in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Vernon of Hilton Park in commemoration of the taking of Portobello in 1739.
Lacy’s Caves, Little Salkeld, Cumbria
Early in 1789 Samuel Lacy, a military man, bought Salkeld Lodge near the village of Little Salkeld and not far from a very beautiful stretch of the River Eden. In the 1830s he built a new home across the river, which he called Eden Lacy. On both banks of the river he created caves and seats, all carved out of solid rock – the lovely red sandstone so characteristic of the Eden valley.
Mowbray Castle, Hackfall, North Yorkshire
In the middle of the eighteenth century William Aislabie began to create a landscape garden on the banks of the River Ure, near the village of Grewelthorpe. In contrast to his grand estate at Studley, a few miles away, there were few manicured lawns or geometric pools, and instead Hackfall was a ‘sequestered and most romantic place’. Dotted around the grounds were summerhouses and shelters, including a dramatic hilltop tower called Mowbray Castle.
Word soon spread that Hackfall was a place worth seeing, and early visitors recorded their admiration for the place: ‘never was there seen a finer assemblage of wild and variegated nature’ wrote a tourist in 1785. Although visitors frequently refer to the ‘imitations of ruins’ in the pleasure grounds (there’s also a sham-ruin banqueting house), the earliest specific reference by a visitor to ‘Mowbray Castle’ found to date is from the 1780s, which tallies with an account in the archive suggesting work was ongoing in 1778.
By 1801 the gardener, who gave tours of the grounds, estimated that around two hundred parties visited each season. The Yorkshire weather was not always kind, but it didn’t spoil the experience. In 1792 Lord Torrington found ‘so much to admire, so much to celebrate’, despite the rain falling ‘in buckets’. And in 1799 another tourist wrote that he knew of no other place that gave so much pleasure’ even though it ‘rained the whole time’.
When first built Mowbray Castle could be seen from almost every spot within the pleasure grounds, and its ‘isolated situation’ was described as having an ‘extremely happy effect’. William Gilpin, whose comments on landscape were widely-read, criticised the buildings at Hackfall, but few were in agreement. In 1796, the Duke of Rutland wrote that ‘We did not find any room for censure’.
A poem written in 1859 suggested that the castle was an ancient fortification:
Now turn thy steps towards the right,
And view that grand imposing sight –
Tis Mowbray Castle, in decay,
The relics of a bygone day.
But Georgian visitors recognised it as a sham, a ‘very excellent imitation of an ancient ruin’, and praised its natural appearance.
Aislabie’s descendants sold Hackfall to a timber merchant in 1933, and much of the woodland was felled. Happily, the folly survived this period of neglect (although the short section of wall with an arch seen in the early images is lost), and was consolidated as part of a masterplan to restore the pleasure grounds and buildings after Hackfall was purchased by the Woodland Trust in 1989 (with strong support from the Hackfall Trust and other local groups). Sadly the vistas to and from the castle are now largely lost because of tree growth.
Around the time the folly was under construction a boy was born who would grow to great fame as an artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775, 250 years ago this week. He visited Hackfall in 1816, and later worked up one of his sketches into a watercolour now in the Wallace Collection, London.
Hackfall is in the care of the Woodland Trust and is freely accessible to walkers.
J.M.W. Turner clearly admired follies – he painted/sketched the tower at Tabley in Cheshire, Cook’s Folly near Bristol and the Gibraltar Tower in Sussex amongst many others. Click the link in red for events planned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth in 1775.
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The Arches, Hedon, East Riding of Yorkshire (and a move to Essex)
In the Victorian age, many churches were rebuilt or renovated in the very latest taste. One of these was St Augustine’s at Hedon, east of Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Here, the architect G.E. Street oversaw the work, part of which included the replacement of the window in the south transept. But the ancient traceried window removed during the works was to get a second and even a third life elsewhere…