Towards the northern end of the lengthy village street of Long Melford, in Suffolk, stands Melford Hall. In a corner of the garden, overlooking the road and the green opposite, stands a rutilant brick summerhouse. Once furnished with a table and chairs, the little building must have hosted the most elegant intimate parties.
The Summerhouse, Sticklepath, Devon.
On the quiet main street that runs through the village of Sticklepath, near Okehampton, stands a former works known as the Finch Foundry. It has been redundant since the 1960s, and is now a museum. Passing through an arch to the side of the works, the visitor is surprised to find a tranquil garden and beyond it a burial ground where the only noise is the rumbling of the river Taw. In the corner of the burial ground is a little thatched shelter, and more recently it has been joined by the most perfect of nineteenth-century rustic summerhouses.
The Summerhouse, or Lookout Tower, Boscastle, Cornwall
On a promontory overlooking the harbour at Boscastle stands a squat white building bedecked with flags and antennas. It started life in the middle of the 18th century when it was erected as a summerhouse and eye-catcher by Cotton Amy, whose Botreaux Castle estate included the harbour and lands around it. In 1821 the land was purchased by Thomas Rickard Avery, a local merchant and, depending on who you believe, a ‘notorious wrecker’.
Browne’s Folly, Monkton Farleigh, Wiltshire
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.