architecture, Art, Banqueting House, Buckinghamshire, country house, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape garden, Temple

The Wedding Cake, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire

The Folly Flâneuse celebrated her birthday this week, and what better way to mark the occasion than with an enormous cake? Although sadly, this one is not edible. As many of the buildings featured in these pages are gone, it was a real birthday treat to see this new folly, recently constructed to ornament the Waddesdon landscape.

architecture, Banqueting House, belvedere, country house, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Northumberland, Summerhouse, Tower

The Summerhouse, North Seaton Hall, Northumberland

North Seaton Hall stood in the hamlet of the same name, just inland from Newbiggin by the Sea on the Northumberland coast. The house and ancillary buildings were demolished in the 1960s, and the land developed for housing: only the road called ‘Summerhouse Lane’ gives a clue to a fascinating feature which once ornamented the grounds.

architecture, Banqueting House, Buckinghamshire, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Summerhouse

A Musical Interlude

The Folly Flâneuse is away (in search of follies of course), so until next week here is a brief look at the very pretty Music Temple at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, the seat of the Dashwood family.

John Donowell, active 1753–1786, East View of West Wycombe House, Buckinghamshire, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1975.4.1884.

The temple, also known as the Theatre, was designed by Nicholas Revett in the late 1770s, and sits on the largest of the three islands on the lake. Sir Francis Dashwood’s guests would have been rowed over to the island for fêtes champêtres of food, wine and music.

West Wycombe looking rather fine in June 2021.

The Music Temple is just one of the many garden features added to the West Wycombe landscape in the eighteenth century. Some are lost, but others have been restored, or indeed rebuilt, by later generations of the family.

The Temple of the Winds, erected in the late 1750s.

In 1943 Sir John Dashwood gifted West Wycombe to the National Trust, but the house remains home to the Dashwood family. The house and grounds reopen in the spring https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/west-wycombe-park-village-and-hill

There will be no lounging around for the Folly Flâneuse, who will be back next week.

APOLOGIES that there has been a glitch in the system and regular readers will receive two posts this week. If you have missed the other it is here https://thefollyflaneuse.com/bonds-folly-or-creech-grange-arch-dorset/

 

architecture, Banqueting House, country house, Folly, Hertfordshire, landscape, Summerhouse, Temple

Lady Amabel and Landscape Ornament at The Grove, Hertfordshire

Lady Amabel Yorke was the elder daughter of Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardwicke, and his wife Jemima Campbell, 2nd Marchioness Grey, 4th Baroness Lucas. Their family seats were Wrest Park, Bedfordshire, and Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, both of which had parks that were remodelled by Capability Brown with Amabel being privy to the design decisions. She was, then, rather well-informed on matters of landscape gardening, and her 37 volumes of diaries contain countless accounts of visits to the seats of her friends and family, where she sometimes notes follies and garden ornaments.

architecture, Banqueting House, belvedere, boathouse, country house, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Monument, Shropshire, Temple, Tower

The Tong Knoll Monument & Tower, Shropshire.

On high ground in Weston Park, ancestral seat of the earls of Bradford, stands this prospect tower. Although Weston Park is in Staffordshire, the knoll on which the tower stands is just over the border into Shropshire, and it was formerly home to another monument, allegedly built for the most repulsive of reasons. 

architecture, Banqueting House, belvedere, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Tower, West Sussex

Racton Tower, Racton, West Sussex

The hamlet of Racton, in a quiet corner of West Sussex, is little more than a church and a cluster of cottages. What catches the eye is the dramatic ruin, with tapering central tower, that stands above the settlement. This is the belvedere erected by George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax, as an ornament to his Stansted Park estate.

architecture, Banqueting House, belvedere, Column, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Observatory, sham castle, Tower

‘Famous Follies’: a Nineteenth Century View

In 1896 a new publication was launched in Britain. Pearson’s Magazine was a miscellany of fact and fiction, and is best known today for a landmark event of 1922: the appearance of the first ever crossword puzzle in a British publication. Only a year after it first appeared on newsstands the magazine was attracting writers of the highest calibre, including H.G.Wells whose The War of the Worlds was serialised in 1897. But of course what caught the eye of the Folly Flâneuse was an article from 1898 when Edward le Martin-Breton, wrote an illustrated article on ‘Famous Follies’.