In November 1960, The Queen magazine published a special issue that asked the question ‘What’s so different about the British?’ Amongst the contributors were Norman Parkinson on ‘British Clothes’, Ambrose Heath on the British and cooking and Laurie Lee on the village of Slad. And what could be more British than follies, the subject discussed by Nicholas Guppy, and illustrated in wildly extravagant fashion by cartoonist ffolkes.

Guppy (1925-2012), writer, environmentalist and explorer, thought that ‘follies suit the British temperament’. He elaborated that there is ‘something light-hearted, whimsical and above all disorderly about many of them’ and concluded that they are ‘manifestations of eccentricity, and of rebellion’. Guppy’s article was entitled Follyphilia, the word he coined to describe those with an affectionate regard for such structures.

Some follies, thought Guppy, were built as ripostes to the ‘smug world of columned Palladianism’, (and he pointedly excluded classical garden ornaments from his article). His examples of such ‘crudely-made though often costly buildings’ included St David’s Ruin in Yorkshire, Dunstall Castle in Worcestershire and Arnos Castle near Bristol (pictured top in 1972).

‘…a crumbling edifice on the horizon’, he wrote, ‘inspired awesome thoughts about the vanity of earthly ambition, etc., or at least a fashionably genteel melancholy’.

Follies could provide an imaginary link with ‘a more heroic past’ in the form of a false-fronted cottage, a sham castle or abbey, a tower, or even an entire faux-druidical temple, such as the one near Masham in Yorkshire.

Then there were the towers that just soared higher and higher, often in a bid to outbuild the competition or to announce great wealth and position. Or, in the case of the one at Sway, to test the future of reinforced concrete in building towers.

Dank caves and subterranean passages like Sir Francis Dashwood’s at West Wycombe were too ‘curiously horrid’ for Guppy’s liking, but he did appreciate ‘gay affairs of glittering crystal-spar, of pearly shells and patterned pebbles’ such as the Shell House at Goodwood. Reaffirming his distaste for the Greco-Roman garden ornament he found the grotto at Stourhead ‘too classical’.

But for Guppy the ‘ultimate folly was the hermitage’, combining as it did the ‘picturesque features of a ruin and a grotto, the utmost eccentricity of building materials’ with a human inhabitant. Guppy gives the rustic shelter known as the Sanctuary of Hermit Finch at Burley-on-the-Hill, in Rutland, as his example, but sadly this folly was destroyed by fire in 1962, only a few years after this article was published.

The main image accompanying the article is of a structure that is unlikely to have ever graced a landscape. The cartoonist Michael ffolkes (1925-1988), conjured up a wonderful tower featuring elements of just about every British folly ever built (and a bowler-hatted Brit enjoying the view).

The article is illustrated with small black and white photographs of the follies, and no photographer is credited, so the Flâneuse has chosen to illustrate this post with better quality images of the same follies. All are roughly contemporary with the article, and all are from the Neville and William Hawkes Collection. Neville and William, father and son, were both architects and follyphiliacs, and Neville (1910-1988) took the views shown here at much the same time as Guppy was writing this article.

The Hawkes family donated the photographic archive to the Folly Fellowship, the charity which aims to to protect, preserve, and promote follies, grottoes & garden buildings, and the photographs are reproduced here by kind permission.

Dunstall Castle is in the park at Croome, a National Trust property; the Druid’s Temple on the Swinton estate is freely accessible as is Arnos Castle on the edge of Bristol. The tower at Sway is private, but can be seen from miles around.

If you find the folly illustrated by ffolkes please get in touch.

Thank you for reading. The Flâneuse is always delighted to learn more, or to hear your thoughts, so please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch. 

Follies occasionally appear in literature, but seldom in works aimed at a younger readership. So it was hugely exciting to find that one of Britain’s best-loved writers of children’s fiction had featured a folly in a recent work. This year, a new work by the acclaimed writer Dame Jacqueline Wilson (100 plus books and counting) was published. The Girl Who Wasn’t There is a ghost story within a tale of family life and is beautifully illustrated by Rachael Dean. The reader is only a few pages in when young Luna and Aurora are first introduced to the dilapidated Stark’s Folly, somewhere on the south coast of England…

‘What’s a folly?’ asks Luna when she visits the tower, ‘Isn’t it something foolish?’. Her step-father, Greg, is quick to correct her, and explains that a folly is ‘an amazing building made by someone eccentric’. After years of neglect Stark’s Folly is falling apart, but it is a listed building – much to the fury of the landowner, who would very much like to reverse his tractor into it. Dreaming of sea views and a quirky home Greg snaps it up – but without asking the family first, and it is fair to say their reaction is mixed. This being Jacqueline Wilson, there are the disputes and dramas of family life, but also friendship and warmth, and whilst there is not a fairytale ending, it is a heartwarming (and spine-tingling) one.

Stark’s Folly is the product of Dame Jacqueline’s considerable imagination, beautifully brought to life by Rachael Dean, but Molly the cavapoo is real and is the author’s own dog.

Dame Jacqueline’s touching story and Rachael Dean’s enchanting illustrations will introduce a whole new generation to follies, and that can only be A Very Good Thing. The book is the perfect Christmas present for any young readers you might know (the Flâneuse is not on commission).

And proving that one is never too old to learn, the book introduced the Flâneuse to the word bungaroosh, of which Stark’s Folly is constructed (and therefore crumbling). Thanks to her bonny Brighton correspondent, the Flâneuse now knows that bungaroosh is an unusual building product. It was used almost exclusively in the Brighton area and is made of miscellaneous materials, including stones from the beach, mixed into hydraulic lime and then poured into shutters until set. It is the ‘bane of Brighton’ as it is hygroscopic and soaks up moisture from the air causing damp and collapse. The etymology of the word does not seem to be known, but as Dame Jacqueline says, it’s a ‘fantastic name’.

See the Penguin website for more on The Girl Who Wasn’t There.

And Rachael Dean’s website will tell you more about her vibrant illustrations.

Huge thanks to Dame Jacqueline Wilson and Rachael Dean for their help with this post.

Thank you for reading and please scroll down to the foot of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or comments.

In 1928 a new detective was introduced to readers. Her name was Maud Silver and she was as fond of knitting and quoting Tennyson as she was of solving crimes. She was the creation of Patricia Wentworth, who would go on to write thirty-two books featuring Miss Silver, including The Gazebo, which was published in the United States in 1956 and in the United Kingdom in 1958. Having called this post ‘Murder in the Gazebo’ it is a little late for a spoiler alert, and as you have no doubt guessed the garden building is the setting for key scenes, including the death at the heart of the novel.

Patricia Wentworth was the pen-name of Dora Amy Turnbull (née Elles). She was born into a military family in India in 1877, and spent much of her early life there apart from a spell at school in England. Her first husband, Lt Col George Dillon, was in the Indian Army and their daughter was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1903. Lt Col Dillon died in 1906 and his widow and daughter returned to England: ‘Patricia Wentworth’ started to publish stories and novels soon after. She married another military man, Lt Col George Turnbull in 1920 and he encouraged his wife’s career – apparently she dictated the stories to him.

It was not until she was in her early fifties that Patricia Wentworth first published a Miss Silver novel: Grey Mask appeared in 1928 with Miss Silver introduced as ‘A Sleuthess’ who could teach ‘old Sherlock’ a thing or two. The last of the thirty-two stories appeared in April 1961, a few months after her death on 28 January.

We are told that the fictional summerhouse which appears in The Gazebo was originally built as a belvedere in the landscaped garden of Grove Hill House. The grounds were sold for housing development in the late nineteenth century, and the gazebo now stands on high ground in the garden of a Victorian villa. The octagonal structure is described as having been built in around 1750, so perhaps it looked a little like the Temple of Victory at Allerton Mauleverer in Yorkshire.

The Flâneuse won’t reveal the plot, but it was, thought the reviewer for the Illustrated London News, ‘rather a corny motive, but a nice story’.

The Gazebo was generally well-received, with the critic at The Sphere hailing it as ‘indubitably’ the thriller of the week. Miss Wentworth was, he continued, ‘as neat a practitioner of the detective-story and slyly understated clue as one is likely to meet in a day’s march through a lending library’.

The Western Daily Mail critic seems to have invented a whole new literary genre when he wrote that it was a ‘good offering for those who like a bit of everything that can go on in a gazebo’.

It seems that the publishers thought that some readers would not understand the word ‘gazebo’, so there was an alternative edition entitled The Summerhouse. Which brings us to the great unsolved mystery of where the word ‘gazebo’ originated. According to the Oxford Companion to the Garden it is ‘jokey Anglo-Latin’ for ‘I shall look about’, but other sources suggest it is simply a corruption of ‘gaze about’ or that it was borrowed from an Arabic word. Whatever the etymology, it was in use in the sense of a belvedere, or a summerhouse with a view, by the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1741 Wetenhall Wilkes published a poem with the lines:

Upon the painful summit of the height
A gay Gazebo does our Steps invite.
From this, when favour’d with a Cloudless Day,
We fourteen Counties all around survey.

Wentworth’s novels were published in translation: in France the novel was called Le Belvédère and in German Tod Im Sommerhaus. 

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the bottom of the page to share any thoughts or comments.