Tucked away in the corner of the garden of an Edwardian house in Muswell Hill, north London, is a rather special structure. In 2022 its quirky elegance earned it the coveted title of best ‘Unique/Unexpected’ structure in the Cuprinol Shed of the Year Awards.

This delightful retreat was created by Jane Dorner with the help of her architect friend Simon Hurst. The building has the distinction of being probably the only folly built to solve the problem of where to store cushions in the cooler months (Jane having dismissed the usual plastic receptacles). But, as can be seen, the project became rather more than a storage box and grew to be a gorgeous Gothic Folly. Simon’s design incorporates the all-important cupboard for the cushions, and above it there is a glazed cabinet of curiosities. Jane changes the display as the whim takes her, often selecting items to suit the interests of guests.

When the Flâneuse was lucky enough to visit recently the doors were open and the table was laid with nibbles and home-made vermouth (the red vermouth with a delicious tang of lovage from the garden was a particular treat).

A closer look at Jane’s lovely label designs, showing the interior and exterior of the folly:

The folly is illuminated from above by a lantern filled with what appears to be stained glass, which casts a lovely light. Continuing the sham tradition beloved of folly builders, this is actually a clever use of stick-on lead strips and coloured film.

Below the lantern are Jane’s paintings in grisaille, inspired by the ancient Temple of the Winds in Athens.

As the finishing touch Jane designed the weather vane with her Abyssinian cat Khairo as the model. Or perhaps not quite the finishing touch: the project remains a work in progress, with these two handsome green men soon to be installed…

The folly even has its very own doorbell, alerting Jane to the arrival of lucky visitors. It currently plays Für Elise, but Jane is hoping to find someone who can programme it to play a few rousing bars of La Follia by Vivaldi.

And as if the summerhouse itself was not enchanting enough, here it is in miniature thanks to Jane’s jeweller and designer friend Vicki Ambery-Smith.

Thanks to Jane and Simon for their help with this post. You can discover more about Jane’s folly on her website http://www.editor.net/folly/

Simon has now largely retired from his career as an architect, and is enjoying life as an artist. There’s more about his work here https://www.schd.co.uk/#home

And for Vicki Ambery-Smith’s exquisite jewellery and miniatures see http://www.vickiamberysmith.co.uk

Thank you for reading. Don’t you wish you were sitting in Jane’s folly with a glass of vermouth (or perhaps a coffee if it is still early)? Your thoughts are always welcome – scroll down to the comments box to get in touch.

This unassuming little garden arbour has provided shelter for some of the greats of the 19th century – although the name of only one will be widely recognised today. It was built as a retreat in the grounds of a ‘small Gentlemans House’ called Dove Nest, which ‘stands on a sweet Wooded eminence with a fine grass Knoll in front which commanded a noble view of great lake of Windermere and the fells beyond.

In 1810 Ellen Weeton was employed at Dove Nest as governess to the Pedder family. She described her new surroundings to a friend, writing that a pretty walk led from the house to the flower garden where there was an arbour. Miss Weeton was intrigued by an inscription in pencil recording that ‘Adam Walker was delighted here, June 24th 1807’. Presumably it was the view which had caused such a stir: before the planting on the shores matured the panorama was said to take in almost the whole length of the lake.

Adam Walker (c.1731-1821), author and inventor, is largely forgotten today, and possibly wasn’t known to all even in his lifetime: under the pencilled words Miss Weeton saw a footnote to explain that he was the ‘celebrated experimental philosopher’.

Two decades later another visitor to Dove Nest caused a bit of a stir, for she was then feted as one of the best known writers of the day: Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835).

Mrs Hemans, as she was known, produced a large body of work, but she is best remembered today for The Stately Homes of England and for Casabianca: the latter tells the true story of a young man who refused to leave a sinking ship during the Battle of the Nile. If Casabianca doesn’t sound familiar, you will definitely recognise the opening line: ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’. The poem is perhaps best-known today for its countless parodies, most of which are far too rude to repeat here.

In 1830 Mrs Hemans visited the Lake District to stay with fellow poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) at his home, Rydal Mount. After a fortnight there she decided to extend her stay by a few weeks and rented Dove Nest, a ‘lonely, but beautifully situated cottage’ which she had previously admired from the lake. Joined by two of her sons she enjoyed walking, exploring and boating on the lake.

Mrs Hemans described Dove Nest as having an ‘air of neglect’ which she rather liked. Nature was beginning to ‘reclaim’ the garden from art, and an ‘old-fashioned alcove’ was overgrown with ‘sweet-briar and moss rose-tree’. From the arbour there were views of ‘lovely Windermere’. Wordsworth frequently visited Dove Nest, and one evening he recited verse in the arbour. Mrs Hemans wrote that it was ‘quite a place in which to hear Mr. Wordsworth read poetry’.

Mrs Hemans had become a famous poet not just in Britain but in America too, and during her stay at Dove Nest word soon travelled that the literary lion(ess) was in town. She did her best to hide from the fans from both nations who turned up on her doorstep brandishing their autograph books, and hoping the celebrity would write a few lines (she called it ‘album persecution’). A friend of writer Harriet Martineau suggested she should just hang a bag of autographs on her door to avoid the nuisance callers, and fellow writer Charles Lamb (1775-1834) declared himself ‘no friend to Albums’. He despaired of the young ladies who turned up on his doorstep asking that he contribute to their books. He wrote a poem describing albums which begins:

‘Tis a Book kept by modern young ladies for show,
Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know.
‘Tis a medley of scraps, fine verse, & fine prose,
And some things not very like either, God knows.

Such was her fame that many years after her short stay at Dove Nest, postcards were still being issued captioned ‘Mrs Hemans’ Home’.

Dove Nest has been substantially enlarged since Mrs Hemans stayed there, and is now a smart hotel called The Samling. The garden arbour is listed at grade II.

For more on The Samling https://www.thesamlinghotel.co.uk

In the grounds of Benington Lordship, an early 18th century mansion near Stevenage in Hertfordshire, is a sham ruin on a grand scale. Constructed in the 1830s it combined the roles of eye-catcher, gateway, smoking room and banqueting hall in one rambling structure.

George Proctor had bought the estate in the 1820s, by which date most of the mediaeval castle that once stood on the site had been gone for six centuries. A charming manor house had been erected in its place around the beginning of the 18th century. The spectacular sham was executed in 1835-1838 by the inchoate Hertfordshire family firm of Pulham, which grew to specialise in building garden features in artificial stone – although seldom on the scale of this range which features a sham Norman arch and gatehouse and a separate summerhouse.

The designer is thought to have been the Hertford architect, Thomas Smith (1798-1875). Documentary evidence doesn’t seem to survive, but the work is attributed to him on the basis that he was active locally, and also because he had built a ‘tower and fine archway in the Norman style of architecture’ in his own garden.

The Benington Lordship folly, inspired by the genuine fragments that remained on site, was erected in the form of a substantial ruined Norman castle. Built of flint and artificial stone, it was pictured in the Pulham company’s c.1877 account of their work to date: ‘Picturesque Ferneries and Rock Garden Scenery’. No doubt some antiquarians were horrified at Proctor’s ‘alterations’, but as a visitor in 1897 wrote ‘it cannot be denied that the work is most artistically carried out’.

Elsewhere in the garden remnants of the ancient castle were ‘improved’ as ornamental features. In her research notes Barbara Jones makes clear that she did not think this work as successful as the folly. She described the remains of the keep as a ‘formless lump’ with a ‘fake’ doorway which led to a walk to another ‘lump of stuff’.

Sadly George Proctor did not enjoy his new garden ornament for long: he died in 1840 and was succeeded by his son Leonard. The estate was bought by the Bott family in 1905, and it remains their family home today. Barbara Jones featured the ‘very fine large folly’ in the 1st edition of Follies & Grottoes in 1953, and when working on the revised edition in 1972 (it would be published in 1974) the Bott family were happy to confirm to Jones that the folly was ‘still safely standing’. Fifty years on the same is still emphatically correct, and today’s visitors can even enjoy a cup of coffee and very tasty cake in the structure.

Benington Lordship has been the location for a number of television and film productions, and looks stunning in One Day, the new (2024) Netflix adaptation of the 2009 novel by David Nicholls (episode 9).

The house and grounds also appeared in Late Flowering Lust, the 1993 BBC tribute to Sir John Betjeman starring Nigel Hawthorne and with the dance company Adventures in Motion Pictures (now New Adventures) choreographed by Matthew Bourne. You can see it here, with a great view of the folly about 28 minutes in https://new-adventures.net/news/late-flowering-lust

The castle folly is listed with the house at grade II*, the summerhouse and attached curtain wall are listed at grade II, the remains of the ancient keep are grade I and the gardens are registered as grade II on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

The Bott family open the gardens at Benington Lordship regularly. The snowdrop season has just finished, but things hot up with a chilli festival in August. See the website for details of further open days this year https://beningtonlordship.co.uk. 

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome – please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch.

Robert Elam bought the Woodhouse Grove estate at the end of the 18th century and set about improving his new home and laying-out new pleasure grounds. On a wooded mount, overlooking this new landscape, he erected a tall stone belvedere which survives today. 

Elam (1759-1826), a member of the Society of Friends, rebuilt the house and landscaped the grounds, adding a stone bath house and a network of gravel walks. There was a hot-house and a green-house with vines and he planted ‘English Fruit Trees’ and ‘most kinds of American Apple Trees’. These had been imported by Elam himself, presumably through his contacts in the Quaker world of merchants. A visitor in 1802 admired the ‘extremely beautiful’ gardens.

The grounds already featured a mount, and a vignette on a late 18th century map shows it topped with a summerhouse. Elam replaced this with a square belvedere, and planted the mount with larches and firs through which winding walks led to the summit. Like many follies of the period, the tower is said to have been constructed to give employment in a time of economic hardship: local legend says that Elam had all of the stone carried by hand to create more work.

The ‘nearly Forty Feet high’ tower was built of red brick faced with stone, and roofed with lead. From the castellated rooftop there was an ‘extensive and varied View of the surrounding Country’. Elam and his guests could enjoy views of the River Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The passage of boats on these two busy waterways added much to the ‘picturesque beauty of the scene’.

Sadly Elam would not enjoy his new home for long. Having spent extravagantly on his new home, the story goes that he found himself in financial difficulties and was forced to put the estate on the market. This may be myth, but for some reason the estate was offered for sale in 1802, and when a buyer was not found the ‘justly-admired Residence called Woodhouse Grove’ was offered at auction in Leeds a year later.

In 1811 the estate was back on the market, having been advertised as ‘very cheap’. It was purchased by the Wesleyans to be used as a ‘large seminary of education’, and has continued as a school ever since.

Elam settled in Roundhay, near Leeds, but his brief period of ownership of Woodhouse Grove was remembered. William Greenwood’s The Vale of Apperley, published in 1822, featured his folly:

Charming the view which here the eye commands,
To Woodhouse Grove, where Elam’s Tower stands,
And Aire is seen to glide with devious flow,
‘Neath it’s fair banks where spreading osiers grow…

The tower inspired a schoolboy drama written by Old Grovian Arthur Lincoln Haydon, who was a pupil at the school in the late 1880s. He went on to be the editor of the hugely popular Boy’s Own Paper and author of ripping boarding school yarns such as Terry’s Thrilling Term.

In 1929 Haydon published The Secret of Tuff’s Tower, in which Harrowcliffe school, with its folly tower on a mound, is a thinly-disguised Woodhouse Grove (the author admits as much in his dedication). What dastardly deeds are underway in the ‘square turret of the tall building [which] stood out sombrely above the tops of the elms’? It goes without saying that the plucky pupils solve the mystery, and outwit the ‘villainous, rough-looking’ gang printing counterfeit money in a vault below the tower.

Known to generations of pupils as the ‘Observatory’, the leaded roof is now gone, as is the staircase, but the hollow shell of the tower remains a dramatic landmark. Woodhouse Grove continues as a school, with the tower a prominent feature of the school badge. The grounds are strictly private, but Elam’s Tower can be glimpsed from nearby roads, particularly in the winter months when the surrounding foliage has died back. The tower is listed at grade II.

R.A.H. Goodyear was another Woodhouse Grove old boy who wrote a schoolboy adventure featuring a folly. You can read about it here https://thefollyflaneuse.com/faringdon-tower-faringdon-oxfordshire-and-a-novel-idea/

Comments are most welcome, please scroll down to get in touch with any thoughts or information. Thank you for reading.

Islay House was known as Kilarrow House until the middle of the eighteenth century. It was given its new name by Donald Campbell the Younger after he remodelled the house in the 1760s. Four lookout towers were built on the island, and the two known simply as the East and West towers, survive today in the park.

Donald Campbell junior (c.1737-1777), so-called to distinguish him from his grandfather Donald ‘the Great’, inherited the estate in 1753 whilst still in his teens. After a Grand Tour lasting 5 years, he returned to the island. He then began to improve his estate which stood near Bridgend overlooking the sea loch, Loch Indaal. By early the next century it was described as a ‘handsome mansion […] in grounds tastefully laid out, and embellished with plantations’.

In 1766 Campbell began to build the handsome model village of Bowmore, which would eventually replace the ancient settlement of Kilarrow. In December of that year he advertised the venture and invited ‘mechanics’ of all kinds, but especially carpenters, coopers, net-makers and all those versed in the linen and fishing industries to move to the island and prosper there. Built on a grid system, the ‘new town’ centred on the circular church, which a 1767 account described as ‘now building after a new Model in the Form of the Pantheon at Rome’. It’s a rather loose interpretation, and for rather obvious reasons the Hebridean version has no oculus in the dome. Instead there is a central pillar supporting the structure.

At around the same time Campbell may have ornamented his park with a belvedere or lookout tower. The East Tower, which stands on the knoll called Cnoc na Croiche (‘hill of the hanging’, after the Gallows which once stood there), is a rubble-built octagon, over 11 metres high, which formerly contained 4 floors, although it is now simply a shell.

Above the door is a carved cartouche containing the initials DC, for the builder, and GR, which is assumed to show allegiance to George III (George Rex). The presence of this plaque has led to the assumption that Donald Campbell built the tower, but an alternative theory is that the stone was removed from the house when it was remodelled in the early 19th century, making the tower the work of Daniel junior’s brother and heir Walter (died 1816).

Few contemporary descriptions survive but in the middle of the 19th century it was described as having ’embrasures in the bank for small cannon, giving it the character of a miniature fortification’. Some of these cannon survive today in the undergrowth around the tower, including one that can be identified as dating from the reign of George III.

Until fairly recently the East Tower, on its slight eminence, was clearly visible from the passing road, but it is now becoming obscured by young trees, and with the rooftop platform lost, so too is the view to the loch.

Further from the house, the West Tower is the simpler of the two follies – a squat square tower built of rubble with rough castellations. It carries no inscription, but was built by Daniel Campbell’s descendants as a lookout tower and battery (there were also towers armed with cannon at Bowmore and Port Askaig, both now demolished). They were built to protect Islay during the Napoleonic Wars, and a flashpoint may have been the events of December 1813, when an American privateer, the True Blooded Yankee, entered the loch and plundered ‘several vessels’ before setting them alight.

In more peaceful times both towers were maintained as ornaments within the pleasure grounds of Islay House.

Both towers are listed category B, and both appear on the Buildings at Risk Register in Scotland, although in the ‘low’ category suggesting that general maintenance is all that is required.

Islay House, now a hotel, is a rambling building which has been extended since it was described in 1827 as a ‘large uncouth structure’.

Speaking of which, the Folly Flâneuse’s uncouth companion, who has not made an appearance in these pages for some time, has clearly found something more to his taste than follies…

Islay House is currently on the market, if you fancy life as a Hebridean hotelier you can read more here https://www.knightfrank.co.uk/properties/residential/for-sale/bridgend-isle-of-islay-argyll-and-bute-pa44/edn012287140

If you would like to share any information or thoughts you can find the comments section at the bottom of the page. Thank you for reading.

High above the valley of the River Tilt, within the policies of Blair Castle, sits this beautifully designed and situated eye-catcher. A walk through woodland brings one to the folly and, turning, a wonderful panorama is revealed.

The Whim as it looks today was built by Lord John Murray (1729-1774), who was already managing the Blair Castle (aka Blair Atholl) estate before he succeeded his uncle as the 3rd Duke of Atholl in 1764. He was said to have ‘with great judgement’ laid out walks that ‘cannot fail to attract the admiration of every traveller of taste.’

The idea for a hilltop folly originated in his uncle’s lifetime, and a drawing in the Blair archives, dated 1747 and tentatively attributed to William Adam, shows the arched screen.

It is not clear if this structure was built at that date, or put on hold. But in 1760 a new design, which also included two pavilions in front of the screen, was proposed and drawings and a model were made. The building work was completed in 1762: no architect is recorded and the folly as built has been attributed to the Duke himself. An estate map of 1780, surveyed by the Blair estate factor James Scobie, shows the screen and pavilions, and is annotated ‘The Wheem’. A few years later Scobie included the Whim on another of his maps:

The two little square pavilions are just big enough to shelter in, but the arched central screen is flat, and built only to catch the eye and ornament the landscape.

A visitor in 1799 wasn’t quite sure what to call the assemblage, and settled for a ‘kind of summerhouse’.

John Murray had also been unsure what to name his hillside folly. The story (recounted a century later) is that upon completion of the building, he asked the minister of Blair Atholl, Mr Stewart, what it might be called. Mr Stewart, after considering a little, remarked that it was only a whim. “Well, Whim let it be”, replied His Grace.

This area of Perthshire was popular with 18th century tourists, and there was much to pack into their itinerary, so only the more intrepid seem to have made their way up to the ‘singular building’. As well as functioning as an eye-catcher within the landscape, the Whim was also what was then termed a ‘station’ – a place from which the most perfect views could be obtained. From the Whim there were vistas across the Blair Castle designed landscape with the river and extensive plantations, and a wider view of the ‘whole course of the valley’.

The Whim, listed by Historic Scotland at grade B, is beautifully maintained and will delight visitors for many years to come. Atholl Estates are also to be applauded for the series of way-marked trails that can be explored. The Banvie Burn Walk includes The Whim and, with a short diversion, the Balvenie Pillar, another fascinating landscape feature. It was quite magical on a bright November day last year with the fallen leaves fissling underfoot.

The autumnal equinox fell on Friday, 23 September 2022, so summer is officially over, and we can look forward once more to the gorgeously gaudy hues of autumn.

The walks can be found here https://d1ssu070pg2v9i.cloudfront.net/pex/athollestates/2021/06/21085312/Walks-from-Blair-Atholl-1.pdf

For more on visiting Blair Castle see https://atholl-estates.co.uk/blair-castle/

Comments are always welcome, please scroll to the foot of the page to share any thoughts. Thank you for reading.

At Rydal Hall in Cumbria is an unassuming little garden building. It was built by Sir Daniel Fleming, in the last years of the 1680s, as a summerhouse from which to view of one of the series of cascades on the Rydal Beck that flowed though his estate.

Sir Daniel’s accounts show that the summerhouse was built in 1668-9, and it was described only a few years later as ‘a little grotto [for] retirement’. But its big secret was the ‘very surprising’ view of a tumbling cascade, framed by the window of the ‘Grot-house’. The interior did not have the expected decoration of shells and minerals usually associated with grottoes, but was expensively fitted out with wooden panelling, sadly now lost. Just upstream Sir Daniel added a rustic arched bridge, which gave a view down onto the cascade and to the grotto.

Many descriptions of the grotto were written in the 18th and 19th centuries, when travellers and writers arrived first in pursuit of the picturesque, when Rydal was a ‘must’ on the tourists’ itinerary, and then in reverence of the romantic after William Wordsworth made his home at nearby Rydal Mount, generating another tourism boom (the cascade is mentioned in the poet’s An Evening Walk).

Visitors record being led along a shady walk by a guide who then opened the doors to the simple ‘Rugged House’ to reveal the cataract. In 1812 the guide was ‘a woman bent nearly double with age, who with astonishing alacrity stumped up the hill in a pair of wooden shoes’. (It is a curious characteristic of ‘tourist attractions’ in the 18th century, that the guides were elderly ladies – examples are recorded at the Claife Station and the Bowder Stone in the Lakes, where a blunt tourist found his guide ‘rather deficient in understanding’. At Roslin Chapel in Scotland,  it was noted in 1788 that the ‘old woman who shows it […] is as great a curiosity as the chapel’.)

William Gilpin, famed for his pontificating on the picturesque, found the scene enchanting, and described the beautiful view from the summerhouse window as ‘like a picture in a frame’. A visitor in 1791 appreciated the carefully composed effect seen through the window: ‘over the head of the cascade is an old bridge, and over that a thicket of tall trees – and over that a dark mountain – and over that perhaps a dark cloud’. To the holidaying Londoner this was all very striking, and filled his mind ‘with terror and amazement’. After all this excitement guests could relax and dine in the little room: in 1795 Harriet Clarke recorded in her journal ‘in this grotto we ate, with much pleasure, our morning’s repast’.

Many artists delineated the scene. As well as the views shown here, other works include a John Constable sketch (Abbott Hall, Kendal) and an oil painting by Julius Caesar Ibbetson (Liverpool Museums). But as the keen-eyed will have spotted, they mainly painted the view from inside the grotto, so views of the building itself are scarce.

Many gardens and landscapes would go on to use the concept of the ‘surprise view’. For example at Studley Royal in Yorkshire doors were flung open for the grand reveal of the ruins of Fountains Abbey, and in Scotland the hermitages at Acharn and Dunkeld were both designed to allow a first sighting of waterfalls, but Sir Daniel Fleming’s predates these curiosities by almost a century, and was a ‘picturesque’ viewing station way ahead of its time.

In 1980 the grade II* listed grotto was described as ‘forlorn and neglected’, with the roof falling in and only a fragment of the wainscot surviving. Happily, it was restored in 2005-2007 as part of a major project to renovate the Rydal Hall gardens and park.

The falls are best seen after heavy rain. The Folly Flâneuse, with her usual impeccable timing, chose to first visit in autumn of 2021 during heavy rain, but it was worth getting soaked to see the cascade in full flow. This is the view from a bridge just downstream, not extant when the grotto was built, which enables the grotto and cascade to be seen in one view. Happily a return visit in spring was a brighter experience.

And of course if one visits Wordsworth country in April, one can’t miss the last of the …

Rydal Hall is now owned by the Diocese of Carlisle and is a conference and retreat centre. The grounds are open to visitors throughout the year, and you can continue the more than 300 year old tradition of viewing the cascade from the grotto window. As a visitor wrote in 1799, the ‘lower cascade must ever delight’. https://www.rydalhall.org

For the full history of the construction of the grotto see Blake Tyson’s article in Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, Vol 24, 1980.

For Wordsworth Grasmere see https://wordsworth.org.uk

Thanks for reading. Comments and thoughts are very welcome, please scroll down to the bottom of the page to get in touch.

Sir George Staunton bought the Leigh Park estate in 1820, and set to work remodelling the house and ornamenting the park with an eclectic range of garden buildings. Many are sadly lost today, but a programme of restoration, in what is now Staunton Country Park, is bringing some of the survivors back to life. One of the loveliest of the garden ornaments is this exquisite little Shell-House.

Sir George (1781-1859) travelled to China as a child, and later became a great expert on the country during a career in the East India Service. In 1819 he bought the Leigh Park estate.

The house was then less than 20 years old, and had been extensively remodelled by local architect John Kent at the beginning of the century. The sales particulars described the surrounding park as a ‘perfect ferme ornée’, but its character would soon change as Sir George added ‘numerous objects of decoration and interest’.

The park became home to a Chinese Bridge, Chinese Summerhouse, Turkish Kiosk, and Obelisk, as well as classical temples, rustic shelters and bridges. An artificial lake had three islands – one housed the gardener, one was home to the swans, and the third had a sham fort (with the Chinese flag flown when Sir George was in residence). 

James King composed A Poem on Leigh Park in 1829 extolling the virtues of the spot. The Folly Flâneuse will give just a brief taste from the near 40 pages:

The glorious strife of Art and Nature see,
Within thy Paradise, most lovely Leigh,
An art that glows with every nameless grace,
And emulates the charms of Nature’s face,
An art, O Staunton, by thy genius fired,
By thee with sweet variety inspired…

In 1836 a detailed prose account of the house and park was published: Notices of the Leigh Park Estate tells us that the Shell House was built in 1828, and the design was based on a print of the ancient Chichester Market Cross. Sir George used the architect Lewis Vulliamy (1791-1871) for many of the parkland structures, and the Shell House is therefore attributed to him.

The building was covered in decorative panels of knapped and coursed flint, each filled with pebbles, and inside the walls were ‘encrusted with shells’. Despite Sir George’s connections with far-off lands, these were not exotic specimens shipped home to England, but the spoils of days on the beach at nearby Hayling Island. The Shell-House was used as a museum to house Sir George’s natural history collection. The Notices gave a complete list of the contents, but to summarise there was an extensive collection of minerals, ceramics including Roman pottery and ‘Wedgewood’s designs’, and a ‘small stuffed crocodile’.

Sir George died in 1859, and his obituary recognised his career in China and his subsequent service as a politician. But the writer felt that above all the local community would remember Sir George for ‘the fact of his beautiful gardens and grounds being open to the inspection of all applicants’.

In 1861 William Henry Stone, MP for Portsmouth, purchased the estate and built a new house. In the process of remodelling he demolished one of the landscape buildings, a temple which Staunton had built to house busts and dedications honouring his friends and family. A number of the inscribed plaques were removed to the Shell-House, and hence it became known as the ‘Staunton Memorial’.

Leigh Park was requisitioned for use by the Admiralty during the Second World War. In 1946 it was purchased by Portsmouth City Council as land for new housing and a public open space, and in 1959 the house (by then a Victorian replacement) was demolished. Leigh Park was renamed Staunton Country Park in 1987, and as in Sir George’s day visitors are once more welcome to enjoy the grounds.

A 1944 photograph of the Shell-House shows it was largely intact at that date, but as the century progressed vandalism became a major issue, and by the millennium the grade II* listed folly was looking ‘the worse for wear’. All but one of the wall plaques had disappeared, the shellwork was lost, and the roof had collapsed.

Happily, a £3.8 million investment by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Big Lottery Fund and Hampshire County Council has seen the Shell-House and other structures restored by an expert team, including Conservation Architect John Malaiperuman, who first introduced the Folly Flâneuse to this fascinating park.

The Shell-House’s lost lantern was rebuilt in reconstituted Portland Stone, with natural Portland Stone pinnacles, and the missing flint and pebbles have been restored with materials that match the originals.

In July 2021 the restored park was formally opened. There is an excellent Follies Trail, highlighting both extant and lost structures, including the Chinese Bridge and the Belvedere, pictured here.  https://www.stauntoncp.co.uk/en/hub/765

UPDATE APRIL 2022: The Folly Flâneuse is always pleased to receive feedback from readers who visit follies as a result of seeing them featured here. But she was particularly delighted to learn that a recent post had inspired something much more exciting than a day trip: Alan and Claire Terrill were so charmed by the recently restored Shell House that Claire challenged Alan to build a miniature version as a house for the family’s tortoises Diogenes, Loosestrife and Ephebe. Whilst the Shell House had an interior embellished with shells, Alan decided to put the his shell decoration on the outside, and when temporarily stumped by the construction of the roof, he turned to Jon Malaiperuman, conservation architect for the restoration of the Shell House, who was happy to help. Alan also decided to incorporate silhouettes of noble tortoises standing on pedestals in the blank arches on the sides, in the manner of the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe. As you can see, the tortoises are already very much at home.

For all the latest news visit the Friends of Staunton Park website https://foscp.co.uk

Thanks to Matthew Beckett for permission to use the photo of the Victorian mansion before demolition. His ‘Lost Heritage’ website records the lost houses of England and is well worth exploring http://www.lostheritage.org.uk

Thank you for reading. Do get in touch with any thoughts – there is a comments box at the foot of the page.

In September 1842 the 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane and his family welcomed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Taymouth Castle. They were greeted, with great ceremony, by pipers and by crowds of well-wishers in full highland costume, and a gun salute was fired. The Queen was charmed. During their brief stay Albert went hunting and shooting, returning with a bumper bag each evening, whilst the young monarch spent the days walking and riding in the park.

One day the royal party walked to the Dairy. Queen Victoria wasn’t sure quite how to describe the building, but settled for ‘a sort of Swiss Cottage, built of quartz’. As well as its practical purpose, the Dairy was also a belvedere, with the upper room and balcony giving a magnificent view of the River Tay flowing into Loch Tay, the pretty village of Kenmore, and up the loch to the hills and distant mountains.

Catherine Sinclair, visiting a couple of years earlier, had a more fanciful description: ‘nothing enchanted me more than the fancy dairy, built some years ago of transparent spar, like rough blocks of ice […] It looks as if an ice-berg had been stranded here and excavated for the occasion’.

The Queen’s own journal entry about the visit to the dairy is short, but by ‘her Majesty’s command’ Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote a detailed account of her visit to Scotland, published as Memorial of the Royal Progress in Scotland in 1843. He describes how the Queen walked in by the kitchen door, much to the surprise of the ‘damsels of the Dairy’ who were ‘astonished to see so fine a lady, though they could hardly have guessed that it was the fair Sovereign of these mighty kingdoms’. (This seems highly unlikely, as the workers on the estate had been preparing for the royal visit for weeks, but we must allow Sir Thomas his hyperbole.)

The dairymaids escorted the Queen around the Dairy, where she tried her hand at making butter before asking to try oaten cake. This caught her hosts unawares: they had nothing so rustic, but instead only a plate of ‘delicate’ cakes sent from the castle. The Queen did however enjoy a glass of ‘fine cold milk’ before continuing her walk. She was so impressed with the building that she revisited with Prince Albert on her final morning at Taymouth; the weather was clear and bright and she took her consort up onto the balcony to admire the view, where the Prince ‘entered fully into her Majesty’s admiration of it’.

Her visit was also celebrated in a poem by Samuel Fergusson. Be prepared – it’s very much of it’s time…

And then with steps of love descends
To learn some dairy lore;
And churning with her snow-white hands
Looks lovlier than before.

Tommore (or Tom-more), the hill on which the Dairy stands, was formerly home to a little 18th century pavilion, the Temple of Venus, which like its replacement had been so placed to take in the marvellous view of the lake and mountains.

The Temple of Venus was maintained until 1814, but demolished only a few years later to make way for the Dairy. Erected in 1830-31 to the design of William Atkinson (c.1774-1839), a pupil of James Wyatt, the ‘elegant and costly dairy’ rapidly became a highlight of a tour of the ‘celebrated pleasure grounds at Taymouth’. Its builder, John Campbell, created Marquis of Breadlabane in 1831, died in 1834, and it was his son the 2nd Marquis, who welcomed his sovereign to Taymouth Castle in 1842.

Sadly, as the photographs here show, the grade A listed Dairy is surrounded by scaffolding which has been in place now for a decade, and the structure lingers on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland. Trees now surround the building, and the famed views can no longer be appreciated. Taymouth Castle became a hotel, and its grounds a golf course, in the 1920s, but after various uses the mansion has sat empty since the 1980s. It is currently being renovated as a hotel, and hopefully the Dairy too will be brought back to life in the not too distant future.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box if you would like to add any thoughts. If you are new to the Folly Flâneuse, and would like to receive a folly story in your inbox every Saturday morning, please see the ‘subscribe’ panel below. 

A building that needs little, if any, introduction: the ne plus ultra of follies. But one that continues to perplex, as no architect has ever been identified for this the most ornate and glorious of garden buildings, erected in 1761 for Lord Dunmore. Very few early accounts can be found, but in 1768 a visitor wrote of emerging from woodland to find a pleasure house of which the ‘top part is built exactly in the form of a pineapple’.

The flanking walls supported glasshouses, and were heated to enable the growing of fruit – including pineapples, presumably. Adjacent to the ‘beautiful Pine-apple Summer house’ were four lodging rooms for the gardeners. A visitor in 1783 described the ‘Pine-apple Cupola’ as ‘highly gilded’, so it must have been a breathtaking and unique experience to see it in that period.

The Pineapple was presented to the National Trust for Scotland by the Countess of Perth in 1974. As the NTS’s year book for 1976 recorded, acceptance of the ‘bizarre structure in shape of pineapple’ was only made possible by the ‘co-operation of the Landmark Trust’. The Landmark Trust planned to make the elaborate centrepiece ‘habitable once again so that people may stay in this outstanding vegetable’.

The restored Pineapple quickly became a very popular Landmark Trust property. The grounds and walled garden remain in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, and are in need of a little love and attention when funds are available.

A brief post this week as the Folly Flâneuse is taking a week off to catch up after a Scottish sojourn (so expect more delights from that trip) and will then be heading off once again in pursuit of pavilions and on the trail of towers. Thank you for reading.

For stays in the Pineapple see https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/pineapple-10726/#Overview

To visit https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/the-pineapple