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.

… and, as ever, thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box to share any thoughts or further information. If you would like a complimentary folly story in your inbox each Saturday morning, please click the subscribe button.

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 burial ground was first created by the Quakers, or Society of Friends, in the early eighteenth century. In the middle of the following century it was bought by Thomas Pearse, a woollen manufacturer who had a mill nearby, and vested in trustees from his family. Pearse was a Nonconformist, and it was his wish that people of all beliefs might be buried there. He was a generous donor to local good causes, and in 1838 it was noted that he was planning to mark the coronation of Queen Victoria with ‘a dinner for the whole of the persons under his employ’. The feast would however have been strictly teetotal, for Pearse was the leading light in the local Temperance Movement.

Pearse, who maintained the cemetery, is thought to have erected this little retreat in the corner of the burial ground. In 1942 it was described as having a table and seat, and ‘panels with quotations’ on the walls. Only one can be seen today, and it has lines written by the Scottish poet, journalist and hymn-writer James Montgomery (1771-1854). They first appeared in 1813 in the fifth canto of his long poem The World before the Flood.

A notice in the summerhouse states that it was originally erected in Thomas Pearse’s garden, across the road from the foundry, and that in 1974 it was gifted to the Finch Foundry Trust by a Pearse descendant, Mrs C.N. Jevons. The authors of the National Trust’s guidebook to the foundry are more circumspect about the history of the summerhouse, and it gets only a cursory mention: ‘In front of the graveyard stands what is alleged to be Tom Pearse’s old summerhouse’. Whatever its origins, it is an absolute delight.

The summerhouse is kept in the neatest order, and inside are two painted boards with verses and biblical quotations framed in gothic arches with geometric rustic-work.

In 1966 it was announced that members of the Finch family hoped to turn the ‘dilapidated’ former foundry into a museum where the industrial archaeology of the site could be explained. The Finch Foundry Trust and Sticklepath Museum of Rural Industry ran the site until 1989 when the Museum of Dartmoor Life took over. In 1994 it passed into the care of the National Trust. Finchs’ Foundry is listed at grade II*.

When researching the summerhouse, the Flâneuse discovered that it had inspired a scale model for model railway enthusiasts, and was available to buy in kit form. She was unable to resist, and here is the diminutive work in progress.

Sticklepath was once on the busy main road from Exeter to Penzance, but it is now a peaceful spot after the village was by-passed in 1987. The Flâneuse urges anyone driving along the A30 to make the short detour to visit the village and its attractions. The burial ground and garden can be seen at any reasonable time, and there’s more on visiting the foundry here.

…and greetings from the Flâneuse and thanks for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box below to share any thoughts.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century Lord Rolle of Bicton House in Devon, developed land by the sea in Exmouth in a bid to attract tourists. He made ‘commodious gravel walks’ and created gardens with rustic benches, as well as building elegant marine residences. Lord Rolle also granted a lease on a plot of land to one William Kendall, who in 1824 built a ‘very pretty’ house modelled on the Temple of Theseus in Athens.

The property had a lodge in the form of the ‘Temple of the Winds’, also in Athens, a building more correctly known as the Horologion of Andronikos Kyrrhestes but colloquially as the Tower of the Winds. It is not in sight in Hallet’s view (above) but appears in the centre of James Fidlor’s View of Exmouth:

Little seems to be known about Kendall (1767-1832). He was a solicitor based in Exeter, a founder member of the Devon and Exeter Institution and a poet. He died in March 1832 and his will shows he had a fine art collection. An account of a sale of his collection after his death includes works by Canaletto, Reynolds and Rubens and a ‘Splendid Landscape by Wilson’, as well as classical statuary, an Etruscan vase and bronze models of the Elgin Marbles. So here is a hint of the interest in classical antiquities that must have been the stimulus to build models of ancient temples at his English seaside home. No other account of his inspiration seems to have survived.

The ‘elegant and substantially built residence’ was offered for sale by private treaty soon after Kendall’s death. The six-acre estate had delightful land and sea views, and the house was described as a ‘chaste model of the Temple of Theseus at Athens’. It seems there was little interest, and the estate was again offered for sale by auction in 1842, at which date it was still owned by Kendall’s executors.

It must have been soon after that date that Henry Ward bought the property (he died in 1848 when the house and grounds were once more offered for sale). He goes down in history as having ‘corrupted’ the Temple by putting in bay windows and ‘sticking on it two lateral appendages’. We learn this from Rev. William Webb’s Memorials of Exmouth published in 1872, by which date the Temple was a feature of the grounds of the Imperial Hotel and the ‘Temple of the Winds’ had been demolished. Webb described the surviving temple as an ‘exact copy of the Temple of Theseus’ – the Flâneuse leaves readers to judge for themselves…

The Athenian temple inspired a number of follies and landscape ornaments, including the Penshaw Monument in County Durham, begun in 1844, which captures the spirit of the original but is not an exact copy.

The Temple of Theseus at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, was erected from 1759 to a design by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, who as his nickname suggests had travelled in Greece and specialised in Neoclassical architecture. Like the Exmouth temple, the design of the portico and frieze is inspired by the Greek monument, but the columns on the side elevations are omitted.

Exmouth’s Grade II listed Temple remains within the grounds of the Imperial Hotel, and at 200 years old is in a somewhat tatty state (the facade is maintained but is a different story round the back). The Temple of Theseus in Athens (more correctly the Temple of Hephaestus), constructed in the 5th century BC, has fared rather better and remains a major landmark in that city.

Thank you for reading. As ever, your thoughts are most welcome – scroll down to the foot of the page to find the comments box.

Overlooking the River Torridge in the harbour town of Appledore there once stood a tall, square tower. The story is told that it was built by a wealthy shipowner so that he could keep an eye on his fleet, but that the dimensions were miscalculated and it wasn’t tall enough to command the expected panorama. Thus it became ‘Chanter’s Folly’.

The shipping magnate, merchant and entrepreneur was one Thomas Burnard Chanter (1797-1874), and in 1841 it was announced that he had just completed a ‘splendid signal tower fifty feet high’ near the New Quay in Appledore, just north of Bideford. It was praised for its ‘very ornamental appearance’ and although there are few references it seems to have been known during Chanter’s lifetime as Northam Tower (Northam being the parish in which Appledore can be found).

By the time the Ordnance Survey maps were published in the 1880s it had acquired the title of ‘Chanter’s Folly’ and in 1893, the Western Morning News reported that ‘what appears to be a church tower gone wrong, is explained to be Chanter’s Folly. A shipowner, named Chanter, it is said, built the tower for the purposes of seeing his vessels coming up the Channel, but that when the structure was completed it was found that a certain hill baulked the view’. With the tower gone it is impossible to know if the story is true – but it is interesting to note that the tale only appears after Chanter’s death.

In the first decade of the twentieth century the Woda Estate in Appledore was offered for sale. It comprised of a farm and a quarry and ‘an interesting Watch Tower known as Chanter’s Folly’. Presumably the new owner did not find the tower remotely interesting, and it was left to decline. It remained a popular (for some) local landmark and in 1930 there was a call for it to be restored, but nothing seems to have come of it. The tower was a favourite subject for artists, and it was even used to promote provisions:

In 1937 the tower appeared on one of the posters which were affixed to lorries to advertise Shell petrol to motorists. The husband and wife team of Clifford and Rosemary Ellis chose Chanter’s Folly as their contribution to the poster series ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’, all of which featured follies.

Around the same date the artist John Cooper painted this view of Appledore showing the distinctive tower. Although the tower appears intact, it was by then ‘crumbling’ and had been damaged in a storm in 1927.

In 1948 the folly was punningly described as a ‘Cracking Landmark’ as it by now had a gaping cleft from top to bottom. Nikolaus Pevsner saw it soon after and described it as ‘alarmingly close to a quarry precipice’.

That quarry was to become the tower’s last resting place. In 1952 a strong cable was wrapped around the tower before a bulldozer pulled it down and shunted the debris into the pit below. In what is probably the Flâneuse’s favourite folly headline, a local paper headed their report of the demolition ‘Cr-r-u-m-p-h !’, which is apparently the noise made by a folly being pushed into a pit by a bulldozer.

There were complaints that the demolition had been rushed through, but some were happy to see the ‘ugly blot on the skyline’ gone, and were grateful that the bulldozer had done its work ‘before the “historians” could muster their battalions’.

This “historian” thinks it a sad loss.

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

In 1954 Agatha Christie wrote a novella which was intended to raise money for her local church. Upon completion she was so taken with the story that she decided to develop it into a full novel, and submitted a different story to the fundraising effort. The work she had originally written was called Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, and this work was expanded and eventually published in 1956 as Dead Man’s Folly. 

The story is set at Nasse House in Devon, a ‘big white Georgian house’ overlooking a river that is home to Sir George Stubbs and his young wife. Preparations are underway for a grand garden fête which will feature a Murder Hunt with clues leading to a sham murder. But as this is Christie the death turns out to be for real: that’s not a spoiler, it is blindingly obvious what the course of events will be from the earliest chapters – but as ever the big question is… ‘whodunnit’?

Before the folly can take centre-stage in the story, Christie has to ensure that Poirot knows what a folly is. A character explains to the detective that the folly is ‘one of those little sort of temple things, white with columns’, adding that he has ‘probably seen them at Kew’.

The grounds at Nasse House are also home to a ‘picturesque thatched’ boathouse and an architect is present with a commission to build a new tennis pavilion and repair the folly. Said architect is Michael Weyman, and he is not impressed with Sir George’s choice of location for the folly, which is lost in trees and functions as neither eye-catcher nor belvedere. And having been erected hurriedly only a year earlier (Poirot notes this clue), the temple is already listing on poor foundations. ‘These things were meant to be seen’ complains Weyman, and revealing his knowledge of landscape design in the 18th century he complains that the folly should be visible on a mound: ‘situated on an eminence – that’s how they phrased it’. The architect then reveals that he has been asked to design a tennis pavilion in the form of a ‘kind of Chinese Pagoda’, and grumbles that this is a ‘crime against good taste’.

Dead Man’s Folly was turned into a film in 1986, with Peter Ustinov in the role of Poirot. West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire became Nasse House, with the Temple of Venus playing the folly, although the statue of Venus seen in the photo’ was removed for filming.

A television adaptation was shown in 2013, and it marked the end of an era: it was the last episode to be filmed in the 13 series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot in which David Suchet played the detective. Dead Man’s Folly was filmed at Greenway House, Christie’s own summer retreat which she bought in 1938, and which was clearly the model for the ‘big white Georgian house’ at Nasse.

Christie’s own boathouse becomes the scene of the murder but, as Greenway has no folly, a temporary temple had to be built for the episode (a square temple rather than a rotunda). The closing scenes reveal the crucial role the folly plays in the story.

Christie first came up with idea for a murder mystery based around a folly in 1954, only a year after Barbara Jones had raised awareness of garden buildings when she published Follies & Grottoes in 1953. The Folly Flâneuse would love to know if Mrs Mallowan, as Christie then was in her private life, had seen a copy.

For more on Greenway visit https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/devon/greenway

Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or further information: scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the comments box. Please note that your email address will not be published – only your name will appear. Thank you for reading.

Near the hamlet of Blackborough in Devon’s Blackdown Hills, remnants of the local Whetstone mining industry can be found in the woodland. A battered pile of stones could be assumed to be another relic, but the more curious visitor will be intrigued to discover that it is marked on old maps as ‘Garnsey’s Tower’.

The Garnsey family had lived in the Uffculme area for centuries, and had a seat in the hamlet of Bodmiscombe. Exactly which member of the family built the tower is difficult to discover, and the ‘why’ and ‘when’ remain an only partially solved mystery. A 1938 newspaper report named the builder as John Garnsey, but there were at least three generations of John Garnseys in Uffculme throughout the 18th and well into the 19th century.

What is known for certain is that it was already in decay in 1854, when the polymath Peter Orlando Hutchinson (1810-1897) described it in his diary. On a walk from Uffculme he first visited the whetstone mines: here men dug deep into the hillside to extract the stone called Devonshire Batt, which was then shaped and smoothed and sold as whetstones for sharpening knives. Hutchinson then went on to ‘Garnsey’s Tower’, but his diary account makes it clear that he didn’t know the history of the building.

Hutchinson meticulously measured the diameter of tower, which was twelve feet, and wrote that it was three storeys in height. He was unable to climb it as the floors were ‘ruined and fallen down’. The windows had been blocked to strengthen the structure, but Hutchinson described it as ‘so tottering that it threatens to fall’. Happily, Hutchinson sketched it on the spot, and his watercolour is annotated with some extra information: the tower had fireplaces, suggesting that the Garnseys used the tower as a belvedere and place for refreshments.

Although Hutchinson could not climb the ruinous tower, he did describe the view from a nearby hill, and from that we can conclude that the panorama from the top of the tower would have included views of Dartmoor and the Quantocks, and stretched as far as the sea.

As the 20th century progressed the tower continued to crumble and today a stubby and characterless few courses of stone are all that survive.

Soon after Hutchinson sketched Garnsey’s Tower, he erected an ornament of his own in his Sidmouth garden in Devon. Appalled that sections of the parish church were to be pulled down, he purchased the stone and in 1859 re-erected it in his grounds of his house in Coburg Terrace. The ‘old chancel of Sidmouth church in miniature’ was originally home to Hutchinson’s museum and library, but he later incorporated it into a house, which still stands today. His ‘summerhouse in the tree’, recorded in his diaries, is sadly long gone.

Peter Orlando Hutchinson’s diaries and sketchbooks, which are in Devon Record Office (South West Heritage Trust), have been digitised (an admirable project) and are are hosted on the East Devon AONB website https://www.eastdevonaonb.org.uk/ourwork/projects/peter-orlando-hutchinson

Thank you for reading. If you wish to share any thoughts or further information please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page. 

The Folly Flâneuse is taking a short break, but will be back next week. Meanwhile, here is the dramatic folly high above the mansion at Castle Hill in Devon. Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend in the sunshine.