A little east of the hamlet of Azerley, near Kirkby Malzeard, stands a pretty little cottage with a most unusual feature – from the back of the building rises a slender castellated tower. It was built by the Crompton family of Azerley Hall as a belvedere from which the ‘prospects of the most picturesque description’ were obtained, but it also served as a vantage point to look out for poachers.

Azerley Hall had been a seat of the Dawson family, but was offered to let in 1830 after the death of William Dawson two years earlier. It was described as a ‘Desirable Country Residence’ with outbuildings and pleasure grounds in a ‘genteel neighbourhood’. Robert Edward Crompton (1805-1840) was in residence in the 1830s, and the cottage and tower are believed to have been built soon after 1839 (the tower does not appear on the tithe map of that year, but does appear on the O.S. map surveyed between 1849 and 1853).

In 1861 the tenants were John Jackson and William Wilkinson, both described a few years earlier as ‘game watchers in the employ of Col Crompton’. This was Edward’s brother, Joshua Samuel Crompton (1799-1881). Despite the presence of the look-out tower the problems with poachers continued, particularly under cover of darkness, and being a game watcher was a dangerous job. In 1856 Jackson was pelted with rocks by a trespasser, and a year later an intruder attempted to shoot him. Fortuitously, the gun failed, and the poacher was caught and jailed.

The tower also had a more refined use as an observatory ‘from whence to survey the country, not the heavens’, and the rooftop gave a ‘most extensive and interesting view of the surrounding country’. This view often featured the Bedale Hounds in action, and the tower may have allowed the ladies of the family the opportunity to ‘accompany the sportsmen in the chace [sic] with their eyes, if not amazonially on horseback’ – a potential purpose of belvederes suggested by Francis Goodwin in his Rural Architecture of 1835.

The Crompton family opened the grounds of Azerley Hall (by now alternatively known as Azerley Chase) for charitable events such as the Wesleyan Sunday School treat of 1898. On that day there were games in the gardens and a tea, but the highlight was the chance to climb the tower and admire the ‘splendid panoramic view’.

Later still the tower was used by the Corps of Signallers as an army training camp: in 1911 they practised signalling between Ripon Cathedral, Kirkby Malzeard church and Azerley Tower. In the 21st century the top of the tower was put to a novel sporting purpose as a stand for firing clays at a charity clay pigeon shoot.

The whereabouts of a small stone model of the tower, which apparently once stood in front of the full-size version, remains a mystery. It was last seen in situ in 1978 but, despite an appeal for information via the local paper some 20 years later, no trace can been found today.

The cottage and tower ensemble is listed at grade II. It is a private home and there is no public access but the top of the tower can be glimpsed from public footpaths and from the road between Kirkby Malzeard and Ripon (with great care).

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On a wooded eminence on the Foxley Estate, Herefordshire, stands a tower that was built as a belvedere by the Price family in the first half of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century it had fallen into disrepair, but was restored in the 1970s with the guidance of an impressive group of experts in the field.

The Foxley estate is best known as the home of Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829), the writer on the picturesque, but the belvedere tower was built before he was born. A letter of 1714 notes that ‘Mr Price is resolved to have a Summer House on top of the mount’. The Mr Price in question was either Robert Price (1653-1732) who built a new mansion at Foxley after he inherited the estate upon the death of his father-in-law in 1691, or his son Uvedale Tomkins Price (1685-1764). Both were keen improvers.

An exact date for the construction of the tower has not yet been found, but it was extant by 1738 when a visitor noted the ‘Room’ which had been erected ‘upon the top of a very pretty Hill of a great Hight, from whence you have also a vast variety of Views for a prodigious Circle round’.

The Castle and Mount at Foxley sketched by Robert Price in 1744. Courtesy of Hereford City Library.

A tourist in 1752 also admired the ‘Prospects’ from the ‘Summer House’, but after that date the building seems to have been ignored, or perhaps it was by then hidden by maturing trees? Visitors instead were shown Lady Lift (sometimes Lady’s Lift), a loftier hill north of the house, which had been laid out with winding walks to the summit and allegedly gave a view of nine counties.

In the nineteenth century the estate was purchased by the Davenport family, who are still the owners today. By the 1880s the folly, called simply ‘The Castle’ on a sketch taken in the middle of the eighteenth century, had become known as ‘Ragged Castle’ and is marked as such on the Ordnance Survey maps.

The mansion was occupied by the American and Canadian military during the Second World War. Presumably they were not good tenants for the house was pulled down in 1948 as beyond repair, although the Davenport family retained the estate and continued to live locally. The folly was largely intact until 1955 when the lead was stolen from the roof.

In September 1974 Major D. J. Davenport wrote to the Georgian Group asking if anyone could help him find out more about his folly, which was ‘somewhat of an enigma’. The Georgian Group forwarded the letter to architect and folly aficionado Neville Hawkes, who in turn requested the assistance of Dorothy Stroud (curator at the Soane Museum and author of books on Capability Brown and Humphry Repton), Mavis Batey (leading light of the Garden History Society) and Marcus Binney (contributor to Country Life and co-curator of the exhibition The Destruction of the English Country House, which would open at the Victoria & Albert Museum less than a month after Major Davenport’s letter). Sadly, the responses of this learned trio have not been found.

Hawkes, a passionate recorder of follies, was particularly intrigued by Major Davenport’s description of the tower as being diamond-shaped in plan, and confessed that although he had a huge collection of photographs of follies, he had ‘no diamond’. Keen to fill the gap, Hawkes visited the Ragged Castle in October 1974 and snapped the derelict folly.

The Major, obviously impressed by the enthusiastic architect, asked him to draw up plans to restore the little tower in memory of his father who had ‘loved these woods’.

Hawkes believed that the gothic window frames, fragments of which remained in situ, were later additions as they could be seen to be a poor fit. He therefore proposed restoring the tower with 12 paned sash windows.

The restored tower (which sadly the Flâneuse could not gain permission to see) is listed at grade II and is now a Davenport family memorial. There is no public access.

The Flâneuse is grateful to Dr Michael Cousins for sharing the accounts of early visitors to the castle and to the Folly Fellowship for permission to publish the photographs.

Thank you for reading. The comments box is at the foot of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or information. If you would like a complimentary folly story in your inbox every Saturday morning please click the subscribe button. 

In the village with the simple name of ‘Hill’, near Sutton Coldfield in what was then Warwickshire, lived retired pawnbroker Hugh Lewis. At the time of his death in 1908, Lewis was remembered as ‘a man of very eccentric habits’ and chief amongst these were the building of a high wall around his house and the erection of a ‘Look out Tower’ on Hill Village Road – inevitably it became known as Lewis’s Folly.

The plans for the tower, dated 1892,  survive, and they show that Lewis (1832-1908) asked Noah Deeks junior to draw up a plan for a five storey tower with a flat roof for the prospect. Deeks was variously described as architect, surveyor and Inspector of Nuisances (a large and unappetising category that included sewers and toxic soups).

Another interesting survival is the document announcing Lewis’s intention to build the ‘Look out Tower’ which was submitted with the plan, and approved on 26 August 1892 – planning permission was not yet a universal requirement, but some local authorities checked plans on grounds of public health and sanitation. At that date Lewis gave his address as Boswell Road in Sutton Coldfield, but he would soon move to Woodfield House on Hill Village Road, and the tower was erected a short distance from his new home. The bricks were said to be destined for a new church in Birmingham, but when the plans fell through they were acquired cheaply by Lewis for his new project.

Lewis died in 1908, leaving a brief handwritten will in which he left his entire estate, estimated at £80-£90,000 (before duties), to the Guest Hospital in Dudley. This was a substantial sum for Lewis had reportedly speculated ‘with great success’ in his retirement. Affairs were almost settled when Lewis’s estranged wife appeared and challenged his will: the hospital trustees agreed to pay Mrs Lewis an annual allowance, allowing the hospital to benefit from the bulk of the bequest. Lewis was buried at St Peter’s, Little Aston, where an inscription records only his dates and his benevolence to the hospital.

Woodfield House and adjoining parcels of land were offered for sale in 1909. Lot 8 was a field, with frontage onto both Hill Village Road and the Lichfield Road (now the A5127), on which stood the ‘brick erection know as The Tower’. A clue to the tower’s chance of survival is given in the auctioneer’s description of the field as ‘absolutely ripe for immediate development’. The tower was apparently unpopular with the locals (although they had apparently been happy to watch fireworks set off from its rooftop), and within days of Lewis’s death the local paper reported that the ‘hope has frequently been expressed that it may not be long before this not altogether picturesque landmark is razed to the ground’. The unloved (and, in fairness, unlovely) tower disappeared soon after and, as expected, the land was developed and Hill Village Road is now lined with houses.

Woodfield House is also gone, replaced by flats, but you can still see part of its high brick wall. According to local legend this was built by Lewis to alleviate poverty. The Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group’s website records that Lewis had ‘acquired a large quantity of bricks cheaply. At that time there was a steady trickle of workmen tramping along Lichfield Road hoping to find work and a better life in Birmingham, but rather than give them charity Lewis would offer them a square meal in return for a stint on building the wall.’

This stretch of wall is today the only reminder in Hill village of the benevolent and eccentric Hugh Lewis. Thanks to the Garden Historian for suggesting the tower as a subject.

Thank you to all of the readers who sent congratulations to the Flâneuse on the 400th post on this site. Your kindness made it all the more frustrating when the technology failed last week. This, after a brief hiatus, is post number 401. Thank you for reading. 

Late in the eighteenth century, the Grant family lost their livelihood in their native Scotland and set out to find work in the rapidly developing industries of Lancashire. Pausing to rest on their journey they admired the ‘beautiful valley’ of the River Irwell, which reminded them of Speyside. Decades later they bought the ground, and erected this tower to commemorate that moment.

William Grant (1769-1842) recounted this history in a letter of 1839. He told how he found work in Bury, historically Lancashire but now Greater Manchester, and with his brothers became ‘very successful’ in the textile business (the ‘rags to riches’ story of the brothers is said to have inspired the characters the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens). In 1827 the family added the Park Estate to their considerable land holdings, and there, as Grant wrote, they erected a ‘monument to commemorate my father’s first visit to the valley’. Almost immediately the building became known as ‘Grant’s Tower’.

The architect is not known, and few early descriptions of the tower can be found, but we can assume that the Grants used the tower as a belvedere and party venue. There were wedding festivities at John Grant’s Nuttall Hall in 1848 and banners were hoisted on Grant’s Tower, high above the house (Nuttall Hall was demolished in 1952 and the grounds are now a public park).

The public were initially invited to visit on set days, but by 1892 it was open daily and a popular destination for picnic parties. Refreshments were available, and no doubt picture postcards were also sold – many different views of the tower were in circulation.

In the early years of the twentieth century the tower could be discovered in many kitchens  as it featured on the label of a ‘delicious relish’ called Tower Sauce. Manufactured by Scott & Rosse of Bury, this condiment could, if one believed the advertisements, aid digestion, produce an appetite and ‘please every palate’.

It is first mentioned in newspaper ads in 1904, and the marketing department hit their stride in 1905 when a housewife could send the company three one penny stamps and in return receive a free sample of the sauce and six picture postcards. The cards were ‘guaranteed to be free from advertisements’ – were they perhaps views of the tower?

By 1911 the tower was ‘showing signs of neglect’ and in 1914 the interior of the tower was said to be in a ‘ruinous condition’. There were plans to repair the ‘famous Lancashire landmark’, but the outbreak of the First World War meant that plans were shelved.

Around 1940, with another war underway, Ramsbottom Urban Council began negotiations with the tower’s owner, Sir Peter Lawson, to take control of the tower as soon as the hostilities were over. No agreement was reached, and soon after the tower was closed to the public as unsafe. In September 1944, when ‘Ramsbottom’s weather beaten landmark’ collapsed, the local paper reported that this ‘did not come as a big surprise’. The more dangerous walls of the truncated tower were demolished, and only the roofless lower storey was left standing.

In 2017 Bury Council granted the owner of the tower (it had by now changed hands) permission to repair and reroof the remains of the tower to prevent any further damage to the interior. The renovated remains can be seen from the public footpath that passes the tower.

The Flâneuse would be delighted to hear from you – the comments box is at the bottom of the page if you would like to share any thoughts. If you would like a complimentary folly story in your inbox each week please see below. Thank you for reading.

When Archibald Hogg of Bandrum House built this tower as an observatory and summerhouse in the 1840s, Saline had the ‘well-merited reputation of being the Paradise of Fife’. The village, built along the valley of the Saline Burn, is surrounded by hills and from the eminence called Bandrum this tower enjoyed a prospect of the undulating landscape to the Firth of Forth and beyond.

The story told locally is that the tower, known as the Temple, replaced a wooden structure, which had been erected by the previous owner in around 1805. Construction of the stone tower began in 1845 under the supervision of Lewis Mercer who worked alongside his brothers. Stone stairs lead up to an upper floor, now collapsed, with a fireplace and windows giving an amazing view to Bandrum House and the surrounding countryside.

Lewis Mercer (c.1809-1867) was an architect and mason who lived in Saline and designed and built a number of buildings there. A simple stone marks his burial place in the village churchyard, but the most curious monument to him is his head, carved in stone, which sits outside a house on Main Street in the village.

A poem, published in a local paper in 1888, tells that the from the tower there was a view to Stirling and across the Forth to Edinburgh. The Pentland and Ochil hills, could be seen, as well as the mountains of Ben Ledi and Ben Lomond. The writer recalled his childhood visits to the tower:

‘Twas here I used to sit and gaze upon
The glimmering landscape, as the setting sun
Went down behind Ben Lomond’s lofty peak,
And tinged the hilltops with a golden streak.

The tower (listed as Category C) is now a roofless shell but remains a popular landmark, and rewards the hike up from the edge of the village.

Follow the footpath opposite the entrance to Midfield Terrace in Saline (the path is overgrown and is best left until winter when the nettles and thistles are less ferocious – the Flâneuse speaks from recent experience). Or you could take a leisurely drive into Saline on the B913 and admire the distant tower on its hillside as you approach the hamlet of Cowstrandburn. From this road you will also be able to appreciate the tower’s relationship to Hogg’s seat at Bandrum House, now a nursing home.

Saline was once home to another curiosity – a group of stone figures carved in the 1820s by sculptor George Forrest. Depicted are Tam o’ Shanter and Souter Johnny, characters created by Robbie Burns, and Symon and Bauldy from the poem The Gentle Shepherd by Allan Ramsay. From 1832 Forrest exhibited his sculptures on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, where they were described as ‘one of the most popular and attractive exhibitions in the Scottish metropolis’. The collection was gradually dispersed after his death in 1852, and these four figures found a home in the grounds of Kirklands House in Saline. They were sold to Fife Museums Service in 2010. Whilst Symon and Bauldy await conservation, the restored statues of Tam and Johnny can now be seen outside Dunfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries.

Thank you for reading. Further information is always welcome so please scroll down to the comments box to share your thoughts.

Close to the border between Wales and England stands a simple, but elegant, stone tower. It was built in the early nineteenth century, but was later abandoned and left to decay. It was renovated in the 1980s, and again more recently, and is now a lofty holiday let.

The tower is actually in Herefordshire, but its postal address is Hay-on-Wye which is just over the border in Wales. It was built in the park of an estate called ‘The Moor’, which in the 1820s was home to the extravagantly-named Francis Rigby Brodbelt Stallard Penoyre – the family name being extended in 1824 as a condition of an inheritance.

Architect George Phillips Manners (1789-1866) remodelled the house at The Moor in the 1820s, and is thought also to have designed the tower. The original purpose is unknown: the Historic England listing suggests it was a water tower, but if so it must have doubled as an eye-catcher and belvedere. It is marked simply as ‘Tower’ on the first Ordnance Survey maps in the 1880s.

The house at The Moor was let to tenants in the later nineteenth century, and occupied by the United States Army during the Second World War. In peace time it was considered too large to be used as a family home and, when an institutional use could not be found, it was demolished in the 1950s. The tower was not maintained, and by 1964, as the photo’ above shows, it had fallen into desuetude.

Some years later the Penoyre family offered it to John Nankivell, an artist and friend, for the sum of one pound a year, subject to him renovating the ‘gutted’ structure. Work was described as ‘almost complete’ in 1989 after Nankivell had fitted out the tower with architectural salvage, including ironwork from a hotel in Ilfracombe and doors from a convent in Wantage.

Early this century the tower reverted to the family, and in 2018 work began to restore the tower as a holiday let. The London-based practice MICA was commissioned to create completely new interior spaces, and even ‘squeezed in an extra floor’ to give more space. Jenkinson Builders of Brecon carried out the work, which was completed in 2021.

A little distance from the tower stands an obelisk which would have been visible from the tower, but is now masked by mature trees. This was once one of a pair, but as a photograph taken in 1964 shows one column had fared better than the other, and that in the foreground collapsed soon after this picture was taken. The story is told that the obelisks were built to create employment at a time of need, with the stone being collected from nearby fields.

In the 1950s Barbara Jones noted ‘fragments of a tablet’ inscribed ‘B.S. Penoyre’ and dated 1826 at the foot of one of the obelisks, and concluded that they were built by Anna Maria Brodbelt in memory of her father, Francis Rigby Brodbelt Stallard Penoyre. However her father was still alive, if failing in health, in 1826 (he died in January 1827) so either Jones misread the date or another explanation is still to be found.

The tower and surviving obelisk are both listed at Grade II.

The Moor Tower is available to book via this link. There is no general public access to the tower or obelisk.

You can read more about the restoration project by clicking here.

There’s a short illustrated article on John Nankivell’s time at the tower in an early edition of Follies, the magazine of the Folly Fellowship. Thanks to a superb digitisation project you can read it here.

Thank you for reading. The comments box is at the foot of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or further information,

On the wooded slopes overlooking the west bank of Windermere in Cumbria (formerly Lancashire) stand the truncated remains of Sowler’s Tower. Although no great beauty today, this curious structure has an absolutely fascinating history. According to one source it was the last resting place of its builders, the Sowlers of Sawrey Knotts, with Mrs Sowler apparently spending eternity within the tower in a glass-topped coffin. The tower is indeed a mausoleum, but its residents are not the Sowlers.

Robert Scarr Sowler (1815-1871) was the son of the editor and proprietor of the Manchester Courier, a role he later inherited. He also had a career in law as a Queen’s Counsel and was active in politics in the ‘Conservative Cause’. Like many other Manchester businessmen he decided upon a house in the Lake District where he could pass ‘such leisure time as he had at command’.

In 1861 he purchased some parcels of land on Sawrey Knotts, advertised as ‘very eligible building sites’ on land ‘tastefully interspersed with Ornamental Trees’. He had a new home built which he named after the location, Sawrey Knotts. The architect was Miles Thompson (1808-1868), who had trained with the well-known Websters of Kendal, and the house was described as ‘just about being completed’ in 1863 (although the datestone gives the year 1866). Immediately behind the house a tower was erected to take advantage of the view.

Business often took Sowler away, but with his wife Frances (1813-1879) he spent part of the year at Sawrey Knotts, enjoying the lakeland scenery. On the piece of land called Sawrey Knotts Brow, the highest spot on his estate, the Sowlers built another belvedere with an even greater panorama of Windermere and the surrounding hills. A stone plaque on the higher tower, named as ‘Sowler’s Tower’ on O.S. maps, confirms the date of 1865.

As well as being a spot for admiring the view and picnicking, the tower was probably also a landmark for the hunt. In 1867 the local paper noted that ‘Reynard’ had ‘swept over Sawrey Knotts past the Giant’s tower’: to date this is the only reference found calling it by this name. In that same year, the Union Jack was flown from the ‘lower tower’ to mark the first roof timber being fitted into place at the new village church, and flags were flown from both towers on high days and holidays. Sadly, readers will have to use their imagination, for no early views of the tower can be found.

The architect of the tower is not known, but was most likely Thompson, who was working on the main house. The story is told locally that Sowler liked to look across the lake to the landmark when he arrived back at Windermere station after business had taken him away (the station hotel was designed by Thompson and may have influenced his choice of architect).

In 1978 architect and follyphiliac Neville Hawkes was taken to see the exterior of the tower by Captain Cedric Dand, of the Sawrey Knotts Hotel and Trekking Centre, as Sowler’s former home had become by 1970. Frustratingly, the Lake District’s notoriously unsettled weather meant that he didn’t take any photographs. Hawkes was told that in the tower there was a structure which housed the coffins of the Sowlers – Robert and his ‘wife Frances who predeceased him and her coffin was glass topped’.

It’s a great story, but one that doesn’t add up. Robert Sowler died first, in 1871, and was buried in St Saviour’s in Ringley, Manchester. Frances was also buried there in 1879. Frances commissioned a memorial window in her husband’s memory which was installed in St Peter’s, Sawrey in 1873 (Sowler had instigated the erection of the church in the mid-1860s). A second window commemorates Frances, and was erected by her sisters.

Captain Dand is remembered as a ‘character’: the ex-Cavalry officer made the news in 1966 when he and a Mrs Elizabeth Braithwaite (‘a businessman’s wife’) claimed to be the first to have trekked to the top of Scafell Pike on horseback. Was Dand pulling Hawkes leg with the tale that the Sowlers were buried in the tower, or did Hawkes misremember the story? Happily, there is a more accurate history of the tower: the building did indeed become a mausoleum, but not for the Sowlers and not until more than a century after the tower was first built in 1865.

Sarah Hilda Edmondson (1892-1963), whose father Robert Holt Edmondson was a major landowner in Sawrey, married Victor Whitaker (1887-1971) in 1923. The couple lived at Howe End in Far Sawrey (their neighbour Beatrix Potter presented Sarah with a copy of the newly-published Tale of Little Pig Robinson at Christmas 1930).

In 1940 the Sawrey Knotts estate was offered for sale, with the ‘well known Sowlers Tower’ and some grazing land being made available separately, and it would seem that the Whitakers bought the tower and land at that date. In 1956 plans were drawn up for what was euphemistically described as a ‘store’ at Sowler’s Tower. The plan shows that Sowler’s Tower was to be lowered to around 10 feet (3m) in height and left roofless: within this fortress of a shell the mausoleum was to be erected. According to the plan it was to be an eight foot (2.5m) square building with walls a whopping two feet (60cm) thick under a Westmorland slate roof.

When Sarah Whitaker died in February 1963, her will requested that her funeral should be carried out and her body ‘disposed of’ in accordance with her wishes, which had been communicated to her Trustees. No further information is attached to the will, but we know that Sarah was interred in the tower as Victor Whitaker’s will included the instruction that he was to be buried alongside his wife ‘in the Vault at Sawrey Knotts’. It also stipulated that his executors should ‘make provision for the upkeep of my grave and my wife’s grave’.

In a memorandum that accompanied his will, he also requested that a stone should be inserted at the vault to match ‘the existing one of Judge Sowler’s’. The simple stone was to carry the initials of he and his wife together with the dates of their death, and his notes include a sketch of how he wished it to look. He also asked that there be a ‘metal plate on outer door suitably inscribed’.

In 1978 Neville Hawkes was told that the vault was ‘in the corner’, so if the tomb designed in 1956 was erected, it must have been removed by that date. After Victor’s death in 1971 the door to the tower was blocked, and barbed wire and jagged glass was put up along the roofline, allowing no access to the interior. All we can be sure of is that Sowler’s Tower was lowered to become the strange, squat structure we see today (slate from the upper storeys scatters the hillside around the tower), and there are no memorial plaques to the Whitakers on the exterior of the building.

The family of the present owners of Sowler’s Tower added it, and the surrounding land, to their estate in 1984. The sale contract stipulated that the coffins were to ‘remain in their present positions without interference whatsoever’ in perpetuity. The Whitakers continue to requiescat in pace in their unusual mausoleum in this tranquil spot.

Sawrey Knotts and its outbuildings, including the belvedere behind the house, have been converted into a number of holiday homes and can be seen from a public footpath. There is no public access to the remains of Sowler’s Tower.

The Flâneuse is very grateful to the present owners of the tower for their help with this post.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts can be shared by scrolling down to the comments box at the foot of the page.

Overlooking the village of Braunton, in North Devon, a ‘prominent church-like’ tower was once a landmark on the heights of East Hill. It was however ‘less ecclesiastical’ than it looked, being a belvedere that was inaugurated in 1857 in commemoration of Sir Robert Peel and his efforts to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846. Only a crumbling ruin remains today, which is a great shame as it has the most fascinating of histories.

The monument was the work of Thomas Mortimer (1798-1866) who lived at nearby Franklin Cottage. According to the 1851 census, Mortimer worked in the Civil Department of the Ordnance, and contemporary documents note him as a ‘linguist, politician and above all philanthropist’. As a ‘staunch liberal’ he had ‘deep sympathies with the working classes’, and is remembered as one who would ‘rather wipe the dew-drops from the brow of an honest labourer than salute the cheek of a duchess’. He was ‘an ardent admirer’ of Sir Robert Peel (below), to whom the tower was dedicated.

Mortimer was also a poet, and he composed some lines about Braunton, in which he described his reasons for settling in the village:

For here, contented with my humble lot,
I early built myself a lowly cot;
Where varied prospects, land and sea,
All tend to my felicity.

His ‘lowly cot’, which he named Franklin Cottage, stood in a large garden and a zig-zag path led up to Mortimer’s ‘pretty tower’ which had a rooftop terrace, complete with battlements and pinnacles, giving magnificent views.

The tower was described as ‘in course of erection’ when Billing’s Directory and Gazetteer of the County of Devon was published in 1857. When completed, the book announced, the tower would have a greenhouse in the lower storey, a study in the upper room, and an observatory at the top. The author was also informed that a bust of Sir Robert Peel was to be placed in a niche between the second and third floors.

Guests from the worlds of literature and politics met in August 1857 to inaugurate the tower, the building of which had been delayed by illness and death: Mortimer’s wife Elizabeth died in 1848 and his teenage son in 1854, and Mortimer himself had spent two years confined to his cottage with an illness from which he feared he would never recover. A flag was flown from the rooftop bearing three Ps for Plenty, Peace and Peel.

Happily, the long inscription was recorded before the tower fell into disrepair:

This tower was built by THOMAS MORTIMER, a Working Man, in honour of SIR ROBERT PEEL, the first British Minister who regarded the claims of Labour, and who when plainly perceiving the justice of FREE TRADE PRINCIPLES, promptly sacrificed his private predilections, and resigned his leadership of a powerful Party, in order to promote the permanent prosperity of the PEOPLE.

He filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he sent empty away.

While Grandeur’s sons seek Glory’s shrine,
At War’s grim Moloch kneel:
Let Labour lovingly incline
To Plenty, Peace and Peel.

One room in the tower was home to a display of local fossils, and built on at the base was a space described as of a ‘more NECESSARY than ornamental kind’ – in other words it housed a privy. This space was ‘dedicated’ to Benjamin Disraeli, who had clashed with Peel over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, and the inscription demonstrated Mortimer’s aversion to the man:

DISRAELI’S REFUGE
Sneering, jeering, satirical BEN –
Most specious of sophists and spiteful of men.

Inside the ‘refuge’ were what the reporter delicately called ‘some lines appropriate to the place’. This was presumably nineteenth century toilet humour, and the newspaper declined to elaborate further.

Within only a few years of Mortimer’s death the tower’s history had become muddled, with a gazetteer published in 1879 claiming that the tower had been erected in 1833 to commemorate the passing of the Reform Bill. The tower seems to have been left to moulder and by 1936 it was overgrown with ivy and ‘battered by storms’. In that year the local parish council decided to buy the land at East Hill as a public open space, and to accept the gift of the tower from the then owner, Captain Stephen Chugg. The councillors thought the hillside would be the ‘perfect space to celebrate’ the forthcoming coronation (of Edward VIII, although of course it would be George VI who was eventually crowned).

The Flâneuse arrived in Braunton keen to visit the tower and this public space but was, alas, thwarted. For reasons unknown, the council’s purchase of the land does not seem to have gone ahead and, after driving round in circles, she couldn’t find any access to the tower.

Post-war, the condition of the tower had been raised, and an article in the local paper asked if there were any ‘Braunton people sufficiently interested in its preservation to take some action in the matter’. It doesn’t appear that there was any interest, and the tower continued to deteriorate.

By the time the Ordnance Survey map was updated in the 1960s it was described as ‘Peel Tower (Ruin)’. The tower was listed at grade II in 1985, but sadly there is little left of Mortimer’s platform for his views – political and panoramic.

Sir Robert Peel died in 1850 and he was buried at St Peter’s at Drayton Bassett in Staffordshire. With monuments and statues being erected across the country, his family chose to install a simple plaque in the church:

In memory of
The Rt Hon Sir Robert Peel, Bart.
to whom the People
have raised Monuments
in many places.
His Children
erect this in the place
where his body
has been buried.

Among the many monuments raised by the people was another ‘Peel Tower’. This was erected on Holcombe Moor, near Ramsbottom in Lancashire, and opened in 1852. Unlike the Braunton tower, the Flâneuse did not struggle to find this mighty landmark.

Thanks to Rosemary Madgett of Braunton Museum for her help with this post.

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In 1761, Henry Blundell was given control of the Ince Blundell estate by his father. He had recently married Elizabeth Mostyn and the couple settled into the mansion house, which had been built earlier in the century. Blundell was an avid collector, with the funds to indulge his passion, and after his wife’s early death he spent time in Italy before returning to Ince Blundell to build two temples ‘purposely for the reception of statuary’.

Blundell (1724-1810) had become very wealthy thanks to family bequests and Ince Blundell was home to an impressive collection of Old Master and modern paintings. What was lacking was a fine collection of Roman statuary, so in 1776 he set off for Italy to join his friend, fellow collector and fellow Catholic, Charles Townley. With advice from Townley, and a network of contacts, he went on something of a shopping spree. Blundell returned to Italy in subsequent years, and also continued to buy works privately and at auction in Britain, quickly running out of space to display the works.

Blundell’s solution was to display sculpture in a complex of garden buildings fronted by a classical pedimented temple. This was connected to a greenhouse and an octagonal room, all of which were filled with sculpture as well as plants (the tithe map of 1843 shows this substantial range of buildings). The temple carries a Greek inscription, shown in the engraving above, which is usually translated as ‘here spring is eternal and it is summer in months not its own’ – i.e. the heated glasshouses allowed plants to flourish in all seasons (this inscription also appears on the orangery in Clapham).

The temple is attributed to the Liverpool architect William Everard (1723-1792) on the evidence that a portrait of the architect showed him with ‘the plan in his hand’, pointing to the completed structure (the portrait was shown at a lecture in Liverpool in 1869, but its current whereabouts are unknown). The temple was extant by February 1790 when it is shown in a drawing (see below). In that same year the Polish princess Isabel Czartoryska visited – she was not impressed by the combination of sculpture and verdure. She complained that Ince was a ‘storehouse of various objects gathered without taste or choice. Plenty of ugly statues and many sarcophagi, so called antique, positioned among the geraniums in the hot houses’.

Blundell soon needed still more space, and in 1801 he discussed the creation a new gallery with Townley. He commissioned a wooden model (sadly lost) of the planned ‘room’, which took the form of a rotunda modelled on the pantheon in Rome.

Like the original, the building was top-lit although, this being Lancashire, it was glazed. When complete it was used to house his ‘choicest specimens’ and one visitor recorded how his ‘eye roved in admiration from figure to figure’. Blundell had boasted that many of the buildings on his estate were to his own design, and he may have designed this building himself, using an executant architect/mason named briefly in the surviving accounts as Hope.

Blundell carefully catalogued his collection and in 1803 he published a handlist of the works in the house and both temples, followed in 1809 by a lavish two-volume illustrated work.

Originally the pantheon was freestanding, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it was connected to the house via a single storey link.

Whilst Blundell understandably favoured classical buildings in which to display the sculpture collection, there was a gothic ornament in his park. Sometime before 1786 a prospect tower was erected east of the house (it is shown on Yates’s map of the County Palatine of Lancaster published in that year). Described in 1823 as the ‘observatory’, it was said to ‘command a very extensive view’.

Named on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps as ‘Blundell Tower’, it disappeared early in the next century and is known only from two artworks. The drawing above, formerly at Stonor Park (once home to Blundell’s son-in-law), is a great record of the lost tower. National Museums Liverpool was able to purchase this view for the city’s collection at Christies in 1992. The tower also appears in a painting by Charles Towne of Blundell’s horse, Duchess (private collection).

James Lees-Milne, Historic Buildings Secretary of the National Trust, visited Ince, a ‘romantic Papist establishment’ in August 1947. By that date the house had descended to the Weld family, who had added the name Blundell.  Lees-Milne found the Pantheon ‘marvellous’, and thought the displays at Ince Blundell must be the ‘finest statuary collections left in private hands’. That ownership was not to last: in 1959 the family presented many of the sculptures to the city of Liverpool, and a year later the house was sold to the Augustinian Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, to be used as a care home.

Although the art world was relieved that the works were to be preserved as a single collection, there was sadness that it could not remain, as Geoffrey Grigson wrote, in ‘the delightful setting which Henry Blundell devised for it’. A group of ‘distinguished members of the Georgian Group’ wrote to the Times expressing their dismay that the collection was to be removed. Writing in response, Vere E. Cotton, former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, explained that the Liverpool Corporation had only decided on removing the collection with ‘extreme reluctance’. The corporation had explored constructing a new access to the Pantheon, taking a long lease on the temple and even taking down the Pantheon and rebuilding it in a Liverpool park. But none of the options was feasible.

Only a fraction of the sculpture collection can be seen in Liverpool today, with the majority of the works inaccessible in store. The Walker Art Gallery has a selection of the eighteenth century copies from Ince Blundell on display, but the city’s World Museum has no works on show,

But there is some very good news. Ince Blundell recently became a respite centre where unpaid carers can take a break and relax. As well as ensuring a future for the house, and providing a wonderful resource for the local area, this new use means that public access is possible, and pre-booked guided tours are available (and highly recommended).

The tour includes the Pantheon, which is now bare of sculpture, although some of the niches still display the catalogue number assigned by Blundell. The interior is in reasonable condition, but sadly the reliefs mounted on the exterior are badly degraded.

The Garden Temple can also be seen, but the attached greenhouse is long gone (ruins of the furthest room can be seen, although this was later remodelled as part of a range of glasshouses). The temple was restored in the late 1990s, but damp is an ongoing problem. Some wall-mounted works can still be admired, but the free-standing statuary has been removed.

The vast sculpture collection is listed in Blundell’s own publications, and more recently it has been discussed in depth in the volumes of The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture, published from 1991.

House, Pantheon and Temple are listed at grade II*. The park is grade II* registered. Ince Blundell is north of Liverpool and, although originally in Lancashire, it became part of the new county of Merseyside in 1974. You can find Ince Blundell visitor information here. 

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Pontypool House, in the ancient Welsh county of Monmouthshire, was a seat of the Hanbury family and stood in a park that was described in 1801 as ‘pleasing, wild and diversified’. The writer of this description was taken on a ‘pleasant ride’ up to a ‘summer house’ called ‘the folly’, from which there was an extensive panorama. It was, he concluded, a ‘singular and almost boundless prospect’ which no visitor to Monmouthshire should miss.

That visitor was William Coxe, who published An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire in 1801. Sadly he gives no further detail of the folly, and few contemporary accounts of Pontypool mention it at all. A tourist in 1784 described being encouraged to visit ‘the folly’ to admire the delightful prospect, and wrote that the view ‘far surpasses my powers of description’. Sadly, he failed to describe the folly itself. Another visitor in that same year noted that it was a near two-mile ride uphill to reach the folly.

There was enlightenment from John Evans, a self-styled ‘Juvenile Tourist’ who noted ‘the Folly‘ in 1804 as ‘a summer-house of semi-circular form, built by the late Mr Hanbury’. This was John Hanbury (1744-1784) who had inherited the Pontypool estate from his father in 1765.

But this is all a little complicated. For what is known as ‘The Folly’ today is an octagonal belvedere, of which more below. In his book The Hanburys of Monmouthshire (1995) Richard Hanbury Tenison writes that the Folly was ‘substantially rebuilt’ in the late 1820s, so perhaps that is when the tower appeared?

What is certain is that by the early nineteenth century the Pontypool estate was ornamented with this octagonal prospect tower known as The Folly.  It is marked as such  on the 1st Series Ordnance Survey map, published in 1832, along with its alternative title of ‘Twr Watch’ (Watch Tower).

The estate had by that date descended to John Hanbury’s second son, Capel Hanbury Leigh (1776-1861). Capel Hanbury Leigh died in strange circumstances in 1861, having taken poison ‘accidentally administered by his valet’. The tower seems to have been allowed to decline in his later years, and a visitor in 1864 found the door locked and the seats around the tower falling to pieces. It was covered with graffiti, but the tourist could not help but admire the ‘poetical proclivities’ of the author of this couplet:

Oh, monument most melancholy
Of stupid and egregious folly.

In 1921 Pontypool Park passed into public ownership. The house became a convent and the park became a recreation ground for the people of Pontypool. In 1932 there were plans to raise a public subscription to renovate the tower, which was showing signs of decay. As a clumsy rhyme of 1937 recorded, the tower

…stares at space with a grave, octagonal frown
While winds tear and tug at his crumbling crown

Progress was slow, and as the decade progressed turmoil in Europe pushed thoughts of folly towers from the minds of the public. In 1938 Pontypudlians would have watched as a new complex was built close to the town: this was one of the new Royal Ordnance Factories manufacturing arms and ammunition for the war effort. The site for the Glascoed facility was chosen because its sheltered location meant that the enemy was less likely to be able to target it with bombs, and also because the damp climate was perfect for the handling of volatile explosives.

Sadly the folly tower was in the wrong place at the wrong time: its prominent site near the new factory was thought to make it a conspicuous landmark for the Luftwaffe, and so in 1940 it was pulled down.

After the war there were calls to rebuild the popular local attraction, but once again nothing was achieved. It was not until the 1990s that local campaigners succeeded in getting a replica landmark back onto its hilltop site. The new tower was officially opened by the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) on 22nd July 1994.

Pontypool Park is freely accessible and there are walks to the grotto and tower: it’s a challenging climb and you can’t just drive up in your handsome motor as in the first postcard shown above. The exterior of the tower and grotto can be viewed at any time, but the interiors are only open on designated days.

There’s a delightful 6 mile round walk which takes in the grotto and tower. After the hard work of the climb to the follies it’s a gentle return stretch downhill. You can then saunter back along the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. Allow time to explore the Torfaen Museum when you get back to the park.

Thank you for reading. Please get in touch if you have further information – you can share any thoughts via the comments box at the foot of the page.