In the 1740s William Kent designed a new garden ornament for Thomas Coke of Holkham. An artificial hillock was constructed on which the temple was to stand, giving it the name the Seat on the Mount. The temple was later pulled down, but fragments of the four busts which once decorated it were salvaged, and incorporated into a cottage in a nearby village. The Flâneuse has written about follies built from the remnants of houses, but a cottage decorated with the remnants of a garden temple is something new.
garden history
‘The Gateway’, Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire
The Flâneuse recently puzzled over this black and white photograph of a tall archway that is annotated ‘Breedon-on-the-Hill’. Internet searches using every combination of the village name with ‘arch’, ‘gate’ and ‘folly’, and as many other ideas as the Flâneuse could come up with, drew a complete blank. But driving into the village there it was, just to our right, and unchanged since the older photograph was taken.
A little way further along the wall from the gateway three letters are created from a patchwork of stone blocks near the entrance to a busy quarry. They abbreviate the former name of the works, the Breedon and Cloud Hill Lime Works Company: Breedon has been the site of quarrying and lime extraction since the eighteenth-century.
Aerial photographs of the quarry, taken in the middle of the twentieth century, show the gateway standing in what appears to be a bare plot, but it is still not immediately clear what purpose the arch serves.
Happily the excellent Breedon-on-the-Hill parish website has links to two volumes of pictorial history which explain that the ‘gateway’ was the centrepiece of a rockery, one of a number built by the owner of the quarry to beautify the village. By the late 1950s the village had become known for these rockery gardens of ‘artistic stonework’ which were planted with flowers and full of ‘vital colour’. According to the history, much of the rockwork was created freehand by Lawrence Wakefield, although the archway is not specifically attributed to him.
For much of the twentieth century the quarry was owned and/or managed by the Shields family. In 1959 Captain C.F. Shields, Managing Director of the works, told a reporter from the Leicester Evening Mail that providing good houses for workers, and ornamenting the village, was ‘making a return’ for ‘despoiling the rock that gives the village its name and character’. And of course the stonework was a great advertisement for the company’s products which included ‘rockery and grotto stone’.
Through the archway, which stands on the village’s Main Street, are steps leading up to the quarry offices, although sadly they now terminate in a ‘keep out’ sign.
If visiting Breedon-on-the-Hill don’t miss the village’s other attractions which include an eighteenth century lockup and the very pleasing War Memorial to those lost in the First and Second World Wars.
Take time to explore the church of St Mary and St Hardulph, which stands high above the village close to the quarry face (it is just out of shot in the aerial photo’ – it stands on the plateau above the quarry face on the right). As well as important Anglo-Saxon sculpture there are also fine tombs, including a vast monument to Sir George Shirley and his family, dated 1598, which features this intricate life-size memento mori.
Thank you for reading and do please get in touch if you know more about the arch, or would like to share any thoughts. The comments box can be found at the foot of the page.
P.S. A well-known landscape ornament has been in the news this week and deserves a mention. Beckford’s Tower, near Bath, won the Award for Restoration of a Georgian Building in a Landscape at the Georgian Group Architectural Awards 2025. Congratulations to all the team at the Bath Preservation Trust
The Arch, Brookmans Park, Little Heath, Hertfordshire
This fine brick arch is one of the few surviving eighteenth century features of the designed landscape of Gobions in Hertfordshire. The mansion is long gone, and much of the park has been developed for housing and a golf course, but the arch still stands – although it has come very close to collapse.
The Tower, Rookesbury, Hampshire
In 1826 Charles Heathcote Tatham exhibited a view of a ‘tower now erecting’ at the Royal Academy. The tower was a belvedere, eye-catcher and summerhouse on the Rookesbury estate, near Wickham, where a substantial new house, also designed by Tatham, was under construction.
The Obelisk, Umberslade, Warwickshire
If you have driven on the M40 in Warwickshire, you might have caught a glimpse of this obelisk in the former parkland of Umberslade Hall. In the middle of the eighteenth century Umberslade was home to Thomas Archer, who commissioned this obelisk. It was originally topped with an eye-catching golden star which, sadly, is long gone but it is known from old photographs.
The Hermitage, Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland
Hawkes 1955
In 1807 the 9th earl of Winchelsea built a rustic retreat deep in woodland in his park at Burley-on-the-Hill. The building was known as ‘The Hermitage’, and soon became the subject of tales which were somewhat fanciful, even in the fantastical world of follies.
The Tower, Tan-y-Coed, Old Colwyn, Clwyd
This little sham castle, once on an open hillside but now surrounded by trees, was erected in the grounds of a house called Tan-y-Coed (Foot of the Woods) in Old Colwyn. It was the home of Charles Frederick Woodall, a retired woollen draper from Manchester, who settled on the North Wales coast in the 1880s for the benefit of his health. He created pretty gardens around his house, with the sham castle the most prominent feature. The tower is a prime example of a folly where the tales told about it don’t bear close scrutiny…
The Monument, Lemmington Hall, Northumberland (via Surrey)
In rural Northumberland an elegant stone column rises in a field. A passer-by would guess it to be an eighteenth century ornament, and they would be right: work to erect it was completed in 1786. But it was not built in Northumberland, where it has stood for a mere century. The monument actually started its life at Felbridge in Surrey, some 350 miles to the south.
The Summerhouse, Long Melford, Suffolk
Towards the northern end of the lengthy village street of Long Melford, in Suffolk, stands Melford Hall. In a corner of the garden, overlooking the road and the green opposite, stands a rutilant brick summerhouse. Once furnished with a table and chairs, the little building must have hosted the most elegant intimate parties.
The Jungle, Swinethorpe, Lincolnshire
Early in the nineteenth century, Samuel Russell Collett moved to a farming estate at Swinethorpe in Lincolnshire. There he constructed a ‘romantic seat’, in the form of a sham castle, which by 1824 was known by the curious name of ‘The Jungle’.