In the middle of the eighteenth century Ralph Allen, who had both a Bath townhouse and the Prior Park estate in a fine landscape just out of town, erected a gothic eye-catcher on high ground above Bath.  The folly took the form of a turreted and castellated screen, unadorned at the back and intended only to be viewed from the city. By the end of the eighteenth century the folly had become known as the ‘Sham Castle’, and it has attracted the gaze of artists ever since it was built.

In 1755 the architect Sanderson Miller, known for fashionable landscape ornaments, was mooted as the ideal candidate to design Allen’s proposed ‘considerable Gothic Object’. However the folly was claimed as his own by Allen’s Clerk of Works, Richard Jones. In an account of his life Jones, wrote ‘in 1762 began the Castle in the warren, and was built in a quarter of a year to my plan’. To further complicate matters, the folly appears on an engraved prospect of Bath published in 1757. Hence the Flâneuse settling for mid-century as a date, and hoping for further evidence to emerge in due course. What is certain is that Allen died in 1764, so he had little time to enjoy his new landscape ornament.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the folly ‘had been allowed to fall into decay’. The two end towers were crumbling and this was blamed on boys who used the castle as a ‘rendezvous for games’.

The estate was still owned by the Allen family at this date, but financial aid to save the folly came from a different source. In 1880 a local paper noted that restoration was underway thanks to help from an unnamed female benefactor. It was only on her death in 1891 that the identity of the philanthropist became widely known: Mary Downing Russell Elliott (née Scott) had quietly, and unbeknownst to even her closest friends, funded a number of civic projects over the years.

Mrs Elliott’s investment allowed the two end towers of the Sham Castle to be rebuilt and the centre towers to be restored. She also funded the restoration of the obelisk and gardens in Orange Grove, next to Bath Abbey.

The Allen family sold the ‘remaining portion’ of their Bathampton estate at auction in March 1921. This included the Sham Castle and around an acre of ground. This parcel was bought by a Mr Candy, who purchased it with the farm he had tenanted, and from the start he was clear about his intentions of selling the folly soon after. That auction of the Sham Castle was held in June 1921, and various uses for the folly were suggested: a tea garden was a tempting proposition, but one rather alarming suggestion was that an ‘asbestos back’ might be added behind the facade to ‘convert the structure into a bungalow’.

Happily (in the latter instance) there was little interest, and the castle didn’t sell, but good news was soon to follow. In July the local paper reported that ‘Bathonians must have noted with much pleasure the announcement last Thursday that the Sham Castle has been purchased by two gentlemen for presentation to the City’. Mr Candy was given due credit for selling the folly at ‘preferential terms’.

Unlike Mrs Elliott, these donors were happy for their identities to be known, and a plaque was erected acknowledging their generous gift to the city. As the inscription records, some further restoration work was carried out in this period.

The Sham Castle has continued to catch the eye of artists. Richard Guyatt chose it as his subject when commissioned by Shell to produce an image for the ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’ poster series, displayed on the sides of the company’s delivery lorries in the 1930s.

And completing four centuries of views of the landmark, Christopher Gee painted this view of the folly…

… and Ed Kluz depicted the folly in a vibrant collage.

If you are in Bath before 10 May, as well as climbing up to the folly for magnificent views (it is publicly accessible – just follow Sham Castle Lane) you can see Richard Guyatt’s view of the Sham Castle in Poster Power!, an excellent exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery.

Thank you for reading. Comments, as ever, are welcome – just scroll down to the foot of the page to get in touch. 

In April 1826 a visitor to Bath noted that William Beckford, a ‘wealthy and capricious voluptuary’, had bought land on Lansdown Hill ‘with the design of erecting a magnificent tower with drest grounds about it’. The visitor knew that this had been planned since soon after Beckford’s move to the city in 1822, but he could see no sign of any progress on the project. Had he arrived just a few months later he would have found builders hard at work.

Beckford (1760-1844) had been the subject of gossip and press speculation throughout his adult life. He was initially of interest simply because he was immensely rich from his family’s interests in the Slave Trade. Then, in 1784, came accusations of sexual activity with a 16 year old boy which soon became the talk of the town, and Beckford and his wife fled to the continent. He would later be famed for his exuberant and extravagant building projects.

On his return to England Beckford built the gothic palace called Fonthill Abbey, in Wiltshire, to a design by James Wyatt. The magnificent house was widely known from prints and books, and so there was much interest in December 1825 when the fall of the ‘fine (but flimsy) architectural structure’ was announced in the press. Although Beckford had sold the estate some three years earlier, it would forever be known as his creation, and Wyatt would be blamed for the inadequate foundations.

After selling the Fonthill estate Beckford moved to Bath. In 1823 the newspapers were reporting that Beckford had three or four hundred men enclosing his estate with a wall, and laying out grounds for plantations where upwards of two hundred trees were to be planted. As the finishing touch, Beckford was said to be intending to build a lofty tower. Progress was slow, and in January 1825 the papers were wondering why it had not materialised. In the autumn of 1826, work eventually began to a design by H. E. Goodridge (1797-1864), a Bath-based architect.

There were those who questioned Beckford’s decision to ‘make new efforts to scale the skies’, given his experience at Fonthill, and in October the papers reported that ‘Mr. Beckford, undismayed by the falling of his celebrated tower at Fonthill, has now above a hundred men employed in the erection of a somewhat similar edifice on Landsdown [sic] Bath’. But some lessons had been learned, and work on the tower was paused in November and not recommenced until all risk of a frost was over.

In 1841 the newspapers, interested in every move Beckford made, reported that he was planning to pull the tower down and sell the collection, as he was so fed up of thieves and vandals breaking in. Happily, the tower was given a reprieve, but the contents were dispersed only a few years later following Beckford’s death in 1844. The tower too was sold, but soon afterwards Beckford’s daughter, Susan, Duchess of Hamilton, was horrified to learn that the grounds were being used as a beer garden. She repurchased the tower and presented it to the parish for use as a cemetery and chapel.

The chapel remained in use until the 1960s, when it was deconsecrated and put up for sale. It was bought by Drs Elizabeth and Leslie Hilliard who established a museum of Beckfordiana in the tower and set up the Beckford Tower Trust to secure its future. Major restoration was carried out in 1997-2000, and again in 2022-2024.

William Beckford and his buildings have been the subject of many excellent books and papers, and this brief account is really just an excuse to say that the newly-refurbished tower is well worth a visit. See the fascinating museum, now with many new items of Beckfordiana on show, then limber up and climb the spiral stairs to the belvedere for views over the city and countryside. You can then enjoy wandering in the cemetery to find both Beckford’s and Goodridge’s resting places, and walk down to the newly-revealed grotto tunnel which Beckford built on the carriage drive to his home in the valley below.

There’s lots more on the Beckford’s Tower website and if you’d like to linger a little longer the Landmark Trust has an apartment in the tower to rent.

Comments are always welcome and you can get in touch via the box at the foot of the page. Thank you for reading.

Ralph Allen of Bath, is well-known for his elegant Prior Park house and gardens and for the magnificent gothic sham castle, one of Britain’s finest follies, which he had erected on the skyline above the city in 1762. The sham castle and Prior Park remain popular attractions in Bath, but a quirky tower erected in Allen’s memory is sadly lost. 

Allen died in 1764 and William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, decided to commemorate him with a monument on Combe Down, close to Allen’s former home. Warburton had married Allen’s niece and so by marriage had come into the Prior Park estate and had reason to acknowledge his friend and benefactor.

The monument stood on, or very close to, the site of a much larger structure, The Lodge, which is shown as an L-shaped structure on a 1742 map. This lodge is thought to have existed for centuries and was probably associated with the chase. By the time the estate was surveyed in c. 1762 a curious gothic building with a tall, round tower had replaced the earlier lodge. This is shown as a vignette on the survey and it was also drawn by the artist Thomas Robins, so we have a good idea what it looked like.

The history is then a little complicated. Ralph Allen’s stonemason claimed, in a contemporary account, that Allen loved the lodge but Mrs Warburton ordered him to pull it down soon after Allen’s death. But clearly the tower was not dismantled and her husband the Bishop embellished it in memory of Allen. Robins also sketched the tower and it is very clear that it was constructed around the tower of the gothic building, reusing existing stonework.

The tower is mentioned in the Revd John Collinson’s history of Somerset of 1791, and whilst there is no detail of the structure he does record the inscription on a tablet:

Memoriæ optimi viri, RADULPHI ALLEN, positum
Qui virtutem veram simplicemque colis, venerare hoc saxum.

Robins added a translation to his sketch of the tower:

You that reverence true & Simple Virtue,
Look with veneration on this Marble.
SACRED
To the Memory of that Excellent man
RALPH ALLEN ESQ

Contemporary comment on the monument has not been found, which is strange as another sketch by Robins shows that the lodge, and therefore the tower, was on a prominent site. Later generations did voice their thoughts, and they were not flattering. In 1895 Robert Peach published a life of Ralph Allen and described the building as ‘devoid of all merit’, describing the inscription as cold and bald. By the 1920s it was obscured by trees and locals thought this just as well, as ‘anything less attractive would be difficult to conceive’. A decade later Alderman T. Sturge Cotterell, acclaimed as ‘one of Bath’s most enthusiastic and best-informed local historians’, thought the structure ‘a terrible example of a Bishop’s attempt to act as his own architect’.

It’s no surprise then that the tower was allowed to decay. Its foundations were shaken during bombing attacks on Bath during the Second World War, causing further damage, and in 1953 it was demolished. Recent archaeological work has made a start on establishing the exact locations of the lodge and tower, and paved the way for further investigations. The full report is here https://www.bacas.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Monument-Field281218.pdf

The sham castle is freely accessible https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/bath-skyline/trails/bath-skyline-walk

Prior Park is in the care of the National Trust https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/prior-park-landscape-garden

Thanks to The Garden Historian for his help with this post.