Eller How is a handsome villa, high above the town of Ambleside. In 1863 it was bought by the Boyle family, and soon after they added this curious prospect tower. Known as the Tower of Beauty and Friendship, thanks to a unique element of the design, it stands on a mound in the gardens.
garden history
The Pagoda, Cardross, Stirlingshire
This curious rustic structure once stood in the grounds of Cardross House in the parish of Port of Monteith, near Stirling. It was built by the estate gardener in around 1853, and according to a picture postcard it became known as ‘the Pagoda’. A family memoir however records it by the rather charming name of The Foghoose.
The Carillon, Loughborough, Leicestershire
Soon after the close of the First World War the people of Loughborough began to consider how to commemorate those who had lost their lives in the conflict. The civic dignitaries considered a number of ideas but the proposal of a ‘lofty tower and carillon of bells caught the imagination of a number of eminent municipal people’.
The Temple of Venus, Harewood House, West Yorkshire
Until the middle of the 19th century visitors to Harewood House, near Leeds, could open the doors of the Saloon (today known as the Main Library) on the piano nobile and ‘walk out upon the fine portico’. From there they could admire the lake and plantations created by the finest landscape designers of the 18th century, and on the horizon they would glimpse a fine domed temple.
Mr Saville’s Garden, Matching Green, Essex
In 1959 the inhabitants of Matching Green, east of Harlow in Essex, were horrified by the appearance of a 6 foot 3 inch statue of a naked lady in a village garden. The figure was the work of Horace Saville, the village blacksmith, and he claimed it was a model of how he wanted his future wife to look.
The Museum, Enville, Staffordshire
Enville, together with Hagley and The Leasowes, was one of the triumvirate of famed eighteenth-century Midland estates. The seat of the Earl of Stamford, it was ornamented with a variety of features: some have disappeared over the years, but fortunately many survive. A number of regular readers were intrigued by the image of the exquisite Museum at Enville which appeared in these pages in April, and asked to know more. So the Folly Flâneuse asked The Garden Historian, aka Dr Michael Cousins, to explain its history…
Various contenders for designer of the unusual garden building have surfaced: Sanderson Miller, the gentleman (i.e. amateur) architect who favoured the Gothick style, for one. Discussion with his mason about ‘Ld Stamfords Green House’ was underway in October 1749 and he spent the rest of that month, and most of the next, drawing up a design. Miller (1716-1780), besides his own inclination to the ‘Gothick’, had a well-stocked library to call upon that included Batty Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved (1741/2). This was a pattern book which builders and owners used for ideas, and may have provided inspiration. By June 1750 William Shenstone, the poet and acquaintance of Stamford, was able to note the new ‘Gothick Greenhouse’ at Enville.


By 1756 Miller’s building had been renamed, with the peregrinatious Dr Pococke noting an elegant ‘Gothick Summer house of Mr Millers design’. Clearly then the greenhouse and summerhouse were one and the same building, and although it has been suggested that the first incarnation of the greenhouse was a wooden structure, no evidence has come to light to support this.
Sandy Haynes, the former archivist at and authority on Enville also concludes that the greenhouse and summerhouse were two names for the same building, writing that: ‘Sanderson Miller’s name is mentioned by too many different sources to be discounted and although Pococke refers to it as a summer-house there is no other building at Enville that he could be describing.’ Sadly no records seem to survive in which the exact use of the building is noted, so we don’t know for sure if the building ever housed plants or was simply a pleasure pavilion, or dual purpose.
By 1770 the building had been repurposed as a billiard room. Joseph Heely’s guidebook of c.1773 described it as being fitted out with a billiard table, a chamber organ, and ‘the inside richly adorned with stucco, the cieling remarkably so’. This work is more difficult to date: Haynes believes that it was during the transition to billiard room that the building acquired its elaborate interior plasterwork, and this brings in another contender: Henry Keene (1726-1776). This rare photograph of the inside of the building as it was in March 1952 shows stucco work that bears a strong resemblance to that in the chapel at Hartlebury Castle in Worcestershire, which Keene refitted and reroofed in the Gothic style in around 1750.


The association between Miller and Henry Keene was strong, with the two working together at Hagley in Worcestershire, Chart Park in Surrey and at Arbury in Warwickshire (where Keene probably took up reins as architect following Miller’s deteriorating mental ill-health at the end of 1759) and it is possible that he undertook the interior work of Enville’s summerhouse. To add to the naming confusion the summerhouse was referred to as a ‘Gothic room’ in 1759, yet was still being called a greenhouse by a visitor as late as 1777.
In 1846, soon after the 7th Earl of Stamford inherited, it was refurbished as a Museum for the display of ‘shells, fossils and curiosities’, and that name has now stuck for almost two centuries. By the middle of the twentieth century the building had decayed significantly and its plight gained public attention. Ultimately the principal structure was restored and reroofed by William Hawkes of Cave-Browne-Cave architects in 1988-9. The interior awaits restoration.

There was another Gothic feature at Enville, a ‘Gothic Seat’ which is sometimes misinterpreted as Miller’s building. It is mentioned in a letter of 1754 from John Ivory Talbot of Lacock Abbey to Miller ‘at Enville we saw an Horrid Massacre of a Fine Gothick design of yours: committed by the Hands of some Shrewsbury man…’ (it was an occasional hazard for architects to have their plans tweaked by owners or masons as soon as their backs were turned). Haynes believes it was the Gothic Seat sited at the west edge of Essex Wood that Talbot was referring to – no views survive, and it fails to get mentioned in any visitors’ accounts after 1759 and so probably disappeared soon after.

Enville is a private estate but opens very occasionally for special events. Keep an eye on their website for details https://envilleestate.com
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, and thank you to Michael for this guest post.
Follies and Pharmaceuticals: a Curious Concoction
Barbara Jones is best known to readers of these pages as the author of Follies & Grottoes (1953, revised 1974), the first book to consider the subject of garden and landscape buildings in any detail. She also wrote books about popular art, erotic postcards and furniture amongst other subjects, and as an illustrator and designer her work appeared in magazines, on calendars, dustjackets, greetings telegrams and much, much more.
The Wedding Cake, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
The Folly Flâneuse celebrated her birthday this week, and what better way to mark the occasion than with an enormous cake? Although sadly, this one is not edible. As many of the buildings featured in these pages are gone, it was a real birthday treat to see this new folly, recently constructed to ornament the Waddesdon landscape.
Cothelstone Tower, Somerset
Cothelstone was an ancient seat of the Stawel family. In the second half of the 18th century it was the property of Mary Stawel (1726-1780), the sole surviving direct descendant. In recognition of her ancient lineage, George III made her a baroness in her own right in 1760, with the title to pass to her sons from her first marriage to Henry Bilson Legge, Earl of Dartmouth. After the death of her first husband in 1764, Mary married Wills Hill, the Earl of Hillsborough (he would be created Marquess of Downshire after her death).
Garnsey’s Tower, Blackborough, Devon
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’.