Moreton House, in Dorset, is the seat of the Frampton family. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was home to James Frampton who remodelled the house and created new plantations and pleasure grounds. When he died in 1784 his friend Captain John Houlton erected an obelisk on the estate to ‘perpetuate a worthy and much-lamented character’.

The designer of the obelisk is known to be James Hamilton (1748-1829) of Weymouth. Little is known of his career in the years before the monument was erected, but he went on to be highly regarded in his home town. In the 1790s he described himself as ‘Builder and Stone Mason’ and, capitalising on Weymouth’s popularity as a healthy seaside retreat, he was also a ‘Proprietor of Bathing Machines’. He designed houses and a church in Weymouth, and his name is prominent on the 1809 monument to George III in the town.

Moreton is about 11 miles north-east of Weymouth. The obelisk stands at the junction of a network of rides in Fir Hill plantation, which had been laid out by James Frampton (1769-1854) as part of his ‘various and great Improvements’. The monument is 77 feet high (23.5m) and is topped with an elegant urn, which is itself almost 10 feet (3m) tall: this was carved from a block of Portland stone ‘near 4 tons in weight’ (4064 kg). A copper bar connects the urn and the shaft to provide stability, and a lightning conductor was in place from the very start to help avert damage by thunderbolt – an occupational hazard for obelisks.

Although the obelisk carries the date of Frampton’s death, 1784, work was not completed until the autumn of 1786. A full description of the obelisk was given in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1787, and was accompanied by ‘an accurate Engraving’.

The article also quoted in full the inscriptions on the pedestal. On the north side, facing the house, was an inscription in English:

This Obelisk was erected
In the year 1784,
By Captain JOHN HOULTON,
As a publick Teftimony
Of his Gratitude and Refpect
For the Memory
Of his much-efteemed
And lamented Friend
The late JAMES FRAMPTON Efq.
Of this Place.

On the opposite face was an inscription in Latin celebrating Frampton’s creation of the landscape and noting the site of the obelisk as one of his favourite spots on the estate.

Frampton’s children thought his estate improvements and charitable works were all the monument he needed, as detailed on the simple plaque to his memory in the church dedicated to St Nicholas. In building the obelisk Captain John Houlton clearly wished to make a more prominent statement of his admiration for his friend.

The obelisk could be seen from miles around, and was a landmark noted by tourists exploring Dorset. In the nineteenth century, like many prominent landscape ornaments, it was a meeting place for the local hunt. Although the woodland has matured, a vista to the obelisk from Moreton House is maintained.

The obelisk has been in a very poor condition for many years now, and it is listed on Historic England’s Register of Buildings at Risk (it is a scheduled monument rather than a listed building).

As the obelisk decayed, the inscribed plaques were moved to the gate of the village cemetery, a short walk from the church, to ensure their survival.

Moreton’s church, commissioned by James Frampton in the 1770s, is a delight both inside and out. After admiring the very attractive and unusual exterior one goes inside to be amazed by the extraordinary light that flows through the clear glass windows. The church was badly damaged by bombing in 1940 and during the restoration green glass panes were fitted.

These were not popular, so the enlightened congregation commissioned the glass artist Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) to design new panes of engraved glass. These were installed between 1955 and 1987, although, after some controversy about the design, the window featuring Judas was not actually installed until 2013.

James Hamilton created another landscape ornament of a very different kind. In 1808 he designed the chalk figure of George III on horseback that is a feature of the hillside at Osmington, near Weymouth.

The obelisk is on private land, but can be seen from the road into Moreton. The church is very welcoming. The Osmington horse can be seen from the A353 north-east of Weymouth (although at the time of writing it is easy to miss as the chalk has washed away and it is a grey shape on the hillside).

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On high ground above Creech Grange, near Wareham in Dorset, stands a battlemented and pinnacled arch which looks like the entrance to an estate. But no road passes through it, and the structure exists simply to catch the eye and ornament the landscape.

The arch was built by Denis Bond (1676-1747) to terminate a vista from his Creech Grange home. From the arch he could look back to his mansion, and in the other direction was a view out to sea. It was designed by Francis Cartwright, and his original design, dated 1740, is in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

In the mid-20th century the arch was a popular subject for artists. Edwin Smith, best known as a photographer, made an engraving of the folly, and John Piper’s photographs of the folly are in the collection at Tate, as are a number of photo’s by Paul Nash.

Nash (1899-1946) had spent holidays in Dorset as a child and had lived in Swanage in the early 1930s, including the period when he researched and wrote the Dorset volume of the Shell Guides, published in 1936. In September 1937 his hosts were the Barnards of Furzebrook House, and they drove him to see Creech Arch. He was fascinated by the ‘utterly mad gateway’ and took lots of photographs with a camera his wife had bought him (his ‘new toy’ John Piper called it). He also painted a wonderful watercolour, Folly Landscape, which featured in his solo show at London’s Leicester Galleries in 1938. It was originally owned by Nash’s fellow artist (and briefly student of his brother John) Enid Marx, and is now in the collection of Bristol Art Gallery.

Writing about the watercolour in Country Life that year, Nash described the arch as a ‘true folly in that it emphasises, in every feature, its absolute uselessness’. Nash loved the lonely setting of the tower, and its ‘wild privacy’, and told his wife Margaret that he had ‘stalked’ the folly whilst trying to capture it on film and on paper.

At this time Nash was on the look out for a folly to paint. He had been commissioned by Shell to paint one for the Visit Britain’s Landmarks series of advertising posters which were displayed on the company’s trucks delivering petrol across the country. Nash admired the ingenuity of the Shell campaigns: ‘their customers being a motoring population, the […] display of posters is confined to lorries’. But despite his interest in the Creech Arch, he decided to depict nearby Clavell’s Tower at Kimmeridge, leaving the arch to ‘Advertising Artist’ John S. Anderson, about whom little is known.

The folly is now in the care of the National Trust and continues to catch the eye and enliven the landscape.

For Clavell’s Tower see https://thefollyflaneuse.com/steeple-folly-the-black-tower-clavell-tower-dorset-fiction-and-fact/

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APOLOGIES to regular readers that your email alert failed to arrive last week, but you received a double post this week (you may need to click on both titles in your email). Hopefully the technical glitch is now resolved and normal service will be resumed next week.

In the middle of the 20th century books featuring the adventures of the Lockett children captured the imaginations of young readers. One title in particular appealed to the Folly Flâneuse: what ghastly goings-on could have taken place at the ‘half completed and abandoned tower’ known as Steeple Folly? And which real clifftop folly might have been the inspiration for it?

The author of this tale was Mary Evelyn Atkinson (1889-1974), who published as M.E. Atkinson. She was born in London, the daughter of a schoolmaster at Highgate School, but when a small child the family removed to Swanage in Dorset, where her father founded the Durlston Court Preparatory School in 1903. This county would provide the setting for the books in which Bill, Jane and Oliver Lockett roam, free from adult supervision, encountering one adventure after another.

Steeple Folly was published in 1950, and like the others in the series received a warm welcome in the press, with the Western Times writing that the ‘adventures of the Locketts never fail to enthrall’. Beautifully illustrated by writer and illustrator Charlotte Hough (1924-2008) the story, full of nursery teas, housemaids, and gymkhanas, was aimed at a middle-class readership: to the modern reader Atkinson comes across as a complete snob, letting her protagonists patronise the servants and sneer at children who are schooled at ‘some rotten little local outfit’. And to make matters worse she doesn’t even approve of follies! With a rather limited vocabulary she calls the tower ‘that absurd erection’, ‘absurd Steeple Folly’, ‘that stone absurdity’ and, in case anyone has missed her point, adds that at close range the ‘the folly looked positively immense- but just as absurd as ever’.

The folly is largely incidental to the plot, which won’t be explored further in case anyone wishes to read the story, but the Folly Flâneuse wondered what genuine hilltop tower might have inspired Steeple Folly. The most obvious suggestion is the Clavell Tower, aka Kimmeridge Folly, on the Dorset coast which Atkinson would have known as it is only 10 miles or so from Swanage, near the hamlet of Steeple. It is close to landmarks that feature in the book, such as the famous Blue Pool, and like Steeple Folly it is perched on an eminence with extensive views. To be clear: this is pure supposition, but it does give the Folly Flâneuse an excuse to feature this marvellous building.

The tower was built as an observatory, or belvedere, by Revd John Clavell (c.1760-1833) of Smedmore House in 1830. It continued to be a seaside retreat for his heirs, the Mansel family, and in 1852 the cannon that surrounded the tower were fired and flags hoisted to mark a family wedding. Later it served for a period as a coastguard look-out shelter, but meanwhile the soft cliffs of the Dorset coast were slowly eroding and edging ever closer to the tower.

By 1926 the tower itself was deteriorating, and in that year vandals were prosecuted for ‘dislodging and throwing down stones of which the tower is built’. In 1948 the artist John Piper wrote an essay on ‘The Nautical Style’ in which he admired the ‘absolutely sound’ condition of the ancient chapel on St Alban’s Head, in Dorset. He compared this to the Clavell Tower: ‘ a pretty but pathetic attempt at folly building on the coast, six hundred years younger than the Romanesque chapel, but crumbling to bits’.

A 1959 article in Country Life reported that the ruined Clavell Tower was now dangerously close to the edge of the cliffs. It was the tower and the adjacent perilous precipice that the author P.D. James chose as one of the settings for her 1975 murder-mystery The Black Tower, in which her fictional folly has a rather gruesome history. The tower has subsequently appeared on the cover of various editions of the book, as well as playing itself in the 1985 TV adaptation.

The tower continued to moulder until the end of the 20th century, when the Mansels of Smedmore set up the Clavell Tower Trust and took advice from English Heritage. After much analysis and discussion it was agreed that the only option was to dismantle the folly and rebuild it further inland.

This was beyond the means of the Clavell Tower Trust, and a conversation was started with the Landmark Trust to see if they could take on the project and rebuild the tower as a holiday let. The charity’s trustees were understandably concerned about the complexity of the process, but in 2002 gave ‘cautious acceptance’ to the plans. With Heritage Lottery Funding in place to augment funds from a public appeal, and donations from a vast number of charitable trusts, work began in 2006, and the first of many eager guests arrived in August 2008.

Visit the Landmark Trust’s website for details of visiting the tower on open days in September, or to find out about staying in this fabulous folly https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/news-and-events/upcoming-events/clavell-open-day-22/

And for a full history of the tower, including the restoration, see the Landmark Trust’s excellent history album https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/about-us/history-albums/#C

John Piper’s essay was first published in 1938 but revised in 1948 for inclusion in the anthology Buildings and Prospects. His photo’ of the deteriorating tower is in the collection of Tate https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-8728-1-10-44/piper-photograph-of-clavell-tower-kimmeridge-wareham-dorset

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Horton Tower, also known as Sturt’s Folly, is one of those enigmatic erections whose history is vague and usually explained in sentences that begin ‘said to have been…’. What is not in question is its magnificence: seven stories of red brick soaring skywards in the middle of a field. 

Many sources will tell you it was built in 1750, a few give a date of 1700, and Pevsner amongst others says 1726. All are agreed that it was built by Humphrey Sturt, but just to complicated matters there was a Humphrey Sturt senior (1687-1740), and his son Humphrey Sturt junior (1724-1786).

The tower was there by 1765 when ‘Horton Observatory’ was marked on Taylor’s Map of Dorset, published in that year, and a coloured vignette appeared on the 1795 edition of the map (above). Over the next couple of decades it is mentioned by the occasional tourist who passed by, but seldom with any further detail. The only account that gives any description is that of the historian Edward Gibbon: he saw the tower in 1762 and admired the ‘elegant turret 140 feet high’, but complained that the estate was in ‘no order’, and the tower used as a granary.

It seems unlikely that Humphrey Sturt junior would neglect such a wonderful tower only a decade or so after building it, so 1750 seems wrong, and it is equally unlikely that Humphrey Sturt senior built a tower when he was 13, so by deduction 1726 seems the most likely date, although the source for that date remains elusive. Thomas Archer has been suggested as the architect, but again evidence seems hard to find. What we do know is that the vast tower quickly became known as ‘Sturt’s Folly’.

One local story is that Sturt built the tower to overlook the Earl of Shaftesbury’s adjacent estate at Wimborne, the two men being said to be ‘at variance’. If there is any truth in this tale, then the Ashley-Cooper family must have secretly admired the lofty building, for they bought Sturt’s estate in the late 18th century and left the tower standing.

This is prime hunting country, and the tower would have been used to view the hunt and take refreshments, as well as being an ornament to Sturt’s deer park, which also featured a large piece of water (now lost). At the end of the 18th century the folly was put to a very different use by the Royal Ordnance: lofty towers across the country were used for the huge trigonometrical survey that allowed highly accurate maps to be produced. As the 19th century progressed the tower remained a focus for the hunt, with the East Dorset Hounds and other packs meeting at the building.

By the start of the 20th century the building was falling into disrepair, and falling out of fashion. In 1906 Sir Frederick Treves published a celebration of his birth county called Highways and Byways in Dorset. Treves was better known as a surgeon specialising in appendectomy, and is credited with saving the life of Edward VII in 1902. It seems fair to say that he would have liked to remove Sturt’s Folly, as he described it thus: ‘The only blot on the landscape is the nightmare tower of Horton, built for an observatory, and now happily falling into decay.’

In January 1947 the National Trust’s James Lees-Milne and Eardley Knollys went to look at the tower at the request of the Earl and Countess of Shaftesbury, who wished the charity to take on the care of the tower.  ‘Only a calcined beam or two’ was left of the interior, and concluding it was ‘rather ugly’, the pair concluded that it was ‘best not to accept it’.

The tower soon shrugged off this insult, and found a new role as a film star. In 1967 it featured in the film adaptation of Dorset boy Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Sergeant Troy (a rather dashing Terence Stamp) is filmed galloping away across the field with the tower as a dramatic backdrop. Hardy would have known the tower, as he lived in nearby Wimborne Minster for two years. In that period he wrote Two on a Tower, in which the protagonists fall in love as they watch the stars from the top of  ‘a tower in the form of a classical column’. Horton Tower has been suggested as a model, but scholars have found evidence in his papers that the ‘two real spots’, which inspired Hardy, were the tower at Charborough Park, and the monument to Admiral Hardy on Black Down, both in Dorset.

Hardy would have sympathised with the difficulty in establishing a correct history for Horton Tower, as he was aware that historians couldn’t always agree. In Two on a Tower he described the mount on which his fictional tower stands: ‘The fir-shrouded hill-top was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman Camp, – if it were not (as others insisted) an old English Castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field…’

Despite a grade II* listing in 1955, the tower continued to decay, and when it was described in the 1975 Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, it was as an empty shell.

In 1990 the tower was offered for sale, with the story being picked up by newspapers across the country (thanks to its lasting fame from the film role). An unexpected saviour appeared in 1991, when Vodafone was granted permission to use the tower as a transmission mast for mobile phone signal. As part of the deal the company consolidated the tower, and the conservation project was recognised with a Royal Town Planning Institute award in January 1995. The tower remains home to the transmitters, and is regularly upgraded.

The tower can be seen from miles around, but for a close-up try the adjacent public footpath.

View more of Christopher Gee’s work here https://christophergeepaintings.com

You can see John Piper’s mixed media view of the tower here https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/piper/horton-tower-dorset-1942-mixed-media/nomedium/asset/34203

You can see John Piper’s photographs of the tower here https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-8728-1-10-40/piper-photograph-of-horton-tower-in-dorset

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