Painshill, or Pains Hill, near Cobham in Surrey, was the creation of the Hon. Charles Hamilton. From 1738 he landscaped the valley of the river Mole and decorated his estate with an enchanting array of garden buildings, including this pavilion which is known as the Gothic Temple. In 1953 Barbara Jones wrote that she feared the park was ‘beyond help’, but thanks to an amazing restoration project, which began in the 1980s and continues today, it has been returned to its former beauty and elegance.

The open temple, probably one of the first ornamental buildings to be erected in Hamilton’s park (the earliest reference found to date is 1761), was constructed of wood treated to look like stone. As well as being an eye-catcher from the walks and rides in the park, its location was carefully chosen so that visitors would be led to the building from which they could admire a panorama which featured a Turkish tent, a gothic tower, a bridge, a hermitage and a classical temple. On a circuit of the pleasure grounds the visitor would also encounter a ruined Roman arch and a grotto decorated with sparkling minerals.

Barbara Jones described Painshill in Follies & Grottoes, published in 1953. Her first thought was that Hamilton (1704-1786) was a visionary. She imagined him looking at the ‘naturally pretty’ valley and having the courage to turn it into ‘raw earth, puddles, planks and little naked trees’, knowing that ultimately it was ‘going to be alright’. Whilst Jones mused on the origins of the park, Rose Macaulay, whose Pleasure of Ruins was published in the same year, delighted in the decay, describing the neglected park as a ‘delicious wilderness of follies’.

A photograph of 1937, taken by Herbert Felton for the Architectural Review, shows the temple in reasonable condition. The art historian Osvald Sirén (1879-1966) explored Painshill in the late 1940s, and in his China and the Gardens of Europe, published in 1950, he described the Gothic Temple as being in a ‘better state of preservation’ than many of the other garden features (Sirén was spotted photographing the ruined buildings by a young John Harris (1931-2022). Happily for history, the nascent country-house snooper had ignored the ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ signs.)

Whilst some of the garden buildings were lost because of neglect, others had fallen victim to deliberate destruction: the hermitage was apparently chopped up for firewood in the 1940s. Harris saw the Temple of Bacchus as a crumbling wreck in the 1940s, and it had disappeared when he returned in 1954. When a visitor in around 1960 enquired after the temple he was told that it had ‘got a bit dicey so they took a tractor to it’.

By the 1970s the temple was rapidly falling into dereliction, and in February 1977 Elmbridge District Council served a repairs notice on the owner of the park and sent in a team to support the temple within a scaffolding shell. Two months later came big news when the council confirmed that, after some years of negotiation, they were to purchase 47 acres of the ‘much neglected Painshill Park’.

Heritage societies, including the Georgian Group, the Garden History Society and the Council for the Protection of Rural England had already been working behind the scenes to gather information, and in 1973 the historian Alison Hodges had published the first comprehensive history of the garden in Garden History, the journal of the Garden History Society. The Friends of Painshill was founded in 1975, with support from landscape architects, antiquarians, journalists, M.P.s and local residents.

It took until 1980 for the council to acquire a further 106 acres of the park. In 1981 the Friends issued their second newsletter, in which it was announced that ‘Elmbridge Borough Council have now appointed Mrs. J. Burford as the first full time administrator of the park’. One of the earliest structures to be restored was the Gothic Temple (grade II*), with work complete in 1985.

The Painshill Park Trust was founded in 1981 and work began to raise the required funds. One of the principal sources was the National Heritage Memorial Fund, created in 1980, which by 1988 had pledged £1.4 million ‘towards a management plan and towards continuing restoration work’. In 1988-89 the British Museum hosted Treasures for the Nation: Celebrating National Heritage, an exhibition showing the public how the fund was using taxpayers money to save the UK’s most important heritage treasures. Painshill was featured as an example of a garden rescued with the help of NHMF funds, and the text noted the garden as a rare example of one which ‘did not suffer violent change, but was simply abandoned to the hand of time’.

It is impossible to summarise here the vast amount of research, fundraising and building work that took place in the subsequent years (the restored and dazzling grotto alone is a magnificent achievement, and the Temple of Bacchus, toppled by tractor, has been reconstructed), so visit the website to learn more, or better still visit the park itself.

There are some who, whilst full of admiration for the restoration, have a nostalgia for the ‘mystical and wonderful’ ruinous park that they explored as a child, when it was in that condition which the artist John Piper called ‘decrepit glory’. As Henry Parr, who sent the Flâneuse the pre-restoration photographs shown here, wrote: ‘in its ruinous state, Painshill park was beautiful but mysterious, pretty but sinister, lovely but rather unnerving’.

The thrill of pushing through overgrown shrubs and stumbling across an abandoned temple might be gone but, thanks to the amazing restoration project, one once more sees Painshill as Charles Hamilton envisioned it.

There’s lots more on Painshill here. Thanks to historian Cherrill Sands for being an excellent cicerone.

Thank you for reading. As ever, the Flâneuse would be delighted to hear from readers with any thoughts or comments. Scroll down to get in touch.

In 1761, Henry Blundell was given control of the Ince Blundell estate by his father. He had recently married Elizabeth Mostyn and the couple settled into the mansion house, which had been built earlier in the century. Blundell was an avid collector, with the funds to indulge his passion, and after his wife’s early death he spent time in Italy before returning to Ince Blundell to build two temples ‘purposely for the reception of statuary’.

Blundell (1724-1810) had become very wealthy thanks to family bequests and Ince Blundell was home to an impressive collection of Old Master and modern paintings. What was lacking was a fine collection of Roman statuary, so in 1776 he set off for Italy to join his friend, fellow collector and fellow Catholic, Charles Townley. With advice from Townley, and a network of contacts, he went on something of a shopping spree. Blundell returned to Italy in subsequent years, and also continued to buy works privately and at auction in Britain, quickly running out of space to display the works.

Blundell’s solution was to display sculpture in a complex of garden buildings fronted by a classical pedimented temple. This was connected to a greenhouse and an octagonal room, all of which were filled with sculpture as well as plants (the tithe map of 1843 shows this substantial range of buildings). The temple carries a Greek inscription, shown in the engraving above, which is usually translated as ‘here spring is eternal and it is summer in months not its own’ – i.e. the heated glasshouses allowed plants to flourish in all seasons (this inscription also appears on the orangery in Clapham).

The temple is attributed to the Liverpool architect William Everard (1723-1792) on the evidence that a portrait of the architect showed him with ‘the plan in his hand’, pointing to the completed structure (the portrait was shown at a lecture in Liverpool in 1869, but its current whereabouts are unknown). The temple was extant by February 1790 when it is shown in a drawing (see below). In that same year the Polish princess Isabel Czartoryska visited – she was not impressed by the combination of sculpture and verdure. She complained that Ince was a ‘storehouse of various objects gathered without taste or choice. Plenty of ugly statues and many sarcophagi, so called antique, positioned among the geraniums in the hot houses’.

Blundell soon needed still more space, and in 1801 he discussed the creation a new gallery with Townley. He commissioned a wooden model (sadly lost) of the planned ‘room’, which took the form of a rotunda modelled on the pantheon in Rome.

Like the original, the building was top-lit although, this being Lancashire, it was glazed. When complete it was used to house his ‘choicest specimens’ and one visitor recorded how his ‘eye roved in admiration from figure to figure’. Blundell had boasted that many of the buildings on his estate were to his own design, and he may have designed this building himself, using an executant architect/mason named briefly in the surviving accounts as Hope.

Blundell carefully catalogued his collection and in 1803 he published a handlist of the works in the house and both temples, followed in 1809 by a lavish two-volume illustrated work.

Originally the pantheon was freestanding, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it was connected to the house via a single storey link.

Whilst Blundell understandably favoured classical buildings in which to display the sculpture collection, there was a gothic ornament in his park. Sometime before 1786 a prospect tower was erected east of the house (it is shown on Yates’s map of the County Palatine of Lancaster published in that year). Described in 1823 as the ‘observatory’, it was said to ‘command a very extensive view’.

Named on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps as ‘Blundell Tower’, it disappeared early in the next century and is known only from two artworks. The drawing above, formerly at Stonor Park (once home to Blundell’s son-in-law), is a great record of the lost tower. National Museums Liverpool was able to purchase this view for the city’s collection at Christies in 1992. The tower also appears in a painting by Charles Towne of Blundell’s horse, Duchess (private collection).

James Lees-Milne, Historic Buildings Secretary of the National Trust, visited Ince, a ‘romantic Papist establishment’ in August 1947. By that date the house had descended to the Weld family, who had added the name Blundell.  Lees-Milne found the Pantheon ‘marvellous’, and thought the displays at Ince Blundell must be the ‘finest statuary collections left in private hands’. That ownership was not to last: in 1959 the family presented many of the sculptures to the city of Liverpool, and a year later the house was sold to the Augustinian Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, to be used as a care home.

Although the art world was relieved that the works were to be preserved as a single collection, there was sadness that it could not remain, as Geoffrey Grigson wrote, in ‘the delightful setting which Henry Blundell devised for it’. A group of ‘distinguished members of the Georgian Group’ wrote to the Times expressing their dismay that the collection was to be removed. Writing in response, Vere E. Cotton, former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, explained that the Liverpool Corporation had only decided on removing the collection with ‘extreme reluctance’. The corporation had explored constructing a new access to the Pantheon, taking a long lease on the temple and even taking down the Pantheon and rebuilding it in a Liverpool park. But none of the options was feasible.

Only a fraction of the sculpture collection can be seen in Liverpool today, with the majority of the works inaccessible in store. The Walker Art Gallery has a selection of the eighteenth century copies from Ince Blundell on display, but the city’s World Museum has no works on show,

But there is some very good news. Ince Blundell recently became a respite centre where unpaid carers can take a break and relax. As well as ensuring a future for the house, and providing a wonderful resource for the local area, this new use means that public access is possible, and pre-booked guided tours are available (and highly recommended).

The tour includes the Pantheon, which is now bare of sculpture, although some of the niches still display the catalogue number assigned by Blundell. The interior is in reasonable condition, but sadly the reliefs mounted on the exterior are badly degraded.

The Garden Temple can also be seen, but the attached greenhouse is long gone (ruins of the furthest room can be seen, although this was later remodelled as part of a range of glasshouses). The temple was restored in the late 1990s, but damp is an ongoing problem. Some wall-mounted works can still be admired, but the free-standing statuary has been removed.

The vast sculpture collection is listed in Blundell’s own publications, and more recently it has been discussed in depth in the volumes of The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture, published from 1991.

House, Pantheon and Temple are listed at grade II*. The park is grade II* registered. Ince Blundell is north of Liverpool and, although originally in Lancashire, it became part of the new county of Merseyside in 1974. You can find Ince Blundell visitor information here. 

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts or information please scroll down to the comments box.

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.

The ‘New Mount’ at Holkham was constructed in 1742, and the Seat on the Mount the following year. The sculptor Peter Scheemakers provided the four figures, two female and two male, that decorate the front elevation. Coke (1697-1759), created Baron Lovell in 1728 and 1st Earl of Leicester in 1744, could visit the seat and from its elevated site he is said to have watched as his new house was constructed.

The architect Matthew Brettingham Senior, who had overseen building work at Holkham, produced a volume of views which included an engraving of the Seat on the Mount. His text tells us that the temple was home to a ‘small antique figure of the Nile’ and a ‘Coro Marino’ (Sea Chorus) of sea nymphs, centaurs and cupids in alto relievo. The figure of the Nile was added to the earl’s collection in 1752, and the bas-relief panel of sea creatures was bought by Coke in Rome in 1716, and was originally part of a sarcophagus. It was noticed by a visitor in 1767 who saw the summerhouse with an ‘ancient Bass-relief in the wall’.

It would seem likely that the Seat on the Mount was taken down when parts of the garden were remodelled in the late eighteenth century. The figure of the Nile had been moved into the house by 1817, and the summerhouse does not appear on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps. The art historian Adolf Michaelis complicates matters by mentioning the ‘Seat on the Mount’ in his Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, which was published in 1882. Perhaps he was using outdated information? What is certain is that by 1907 the heads from the Seat on the Mount had been used to embellish a simple cottage in nearby Burnham Overy Town (actually a village, but thus named to distinguish it from Burnham Overy Staithe).

How the figures came to be moved to Burnham Overy Town to decorate the little cottage remains another puzzle, and many passers-by must have wondered about the history of the carved heads.

One such curious tourist was the late follyphiliac Jeffrey Whitelaw, and in 1960 he wrote to Country Life magazine asking if anyone knew the origins of the statuary. Whitelaw questioned if the busts were artificial stone from the Pulham factory, but the mystery was solved a couple of weeks later when the Duke of Wellington replied via the magazine’s letters page. The Duke confirmed that the ‘canephoræ’ originally decorated the temple at Holkham. Arthur Wellesley, 7th Duke of Wellington (1885-1972) was an architect, and is of course famed in follydom as the designer of Lord Berners’ tower at Faringdon. Canephoræ are caryatids bearing a basket on their heads that serve as a capital (although strictly speaking canephoræ are female, and two of the figures here are male).

In the later years of the twentieth century the fragments were moved to new positions in the tiny front garden, where they remain today. The cottage is now called ‘The Images’ and can easily be seen from the road through the village, and here’s a rather appealing view of it by artist Richard Swallow.

Holkham may have lost the Seat on the Mount, but other fine garden buildings can still be seen including the Obelisk (see the plate above) and the Temple. The latter was built in 1734 after a sketch by William Kent.

And of course there is the mansion itself and the wonderful collection it holds. The statuette representing the River Nile and the bas-relief panel remain in the family collection (not currently on display), although the latter has fallen apart and is now incomplete.

Coincidentally (i.e. the Flâneuse is not on commission) the cottage is currently on the market. There’s more here. Everything you need to know about Holkham can be found on their website.

For information on sculpture at Holkham the Flâneuse is indebted to The Holkham Collection of Classical Sculpture by Elizabeth Angelicoussis.

Further information is always very welcome. You can get in touch via the comments box at the foot of the page (only your name will appear – your email address remains private). Thank you for reading.

If you would like a folly story in your inbox each week, click on the subscribe tab to sign up.

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.

Rookesbury (often Rooksbury) was the seat of Reverend William Garnier (1771-1835) and his wife Lady Harriett, née North (1771-1847). As well as replacing the existing house with one on higher ground, the couple remodelled the pleasure grounds. A series of views of Hampshire mansions, published in 1825, describes the new landscaping and notes that the ‘elevated Tower’ was under construction. Presumably it was nearing completion, as the author could admire the views to Portsmouth Harbour, the Isle of Wight and the Channel.

From the house a stroll though the flower gardens led to a ‘romantically wooded glen’ from where a winding path meandered to the ‘considerable open eminence’ on which the tower stood. The building was called ‘Summer House’ on the 1839 tithe map, and noted in 1833 as the ‘Observatory’, but later in the century it became known simply as ‘the Tower’. It stood on high ground east of the house.

The views from the top of the tower could still be appreciated in the 1930s, but by 1972 the ‘curious tower’ was in an ‘advanced state of decay’. Barbara Jones saw the building as she was researching the revised edition of Follies & Grottoes in the 1970s (the photograph at the top of the page is from her collection). She admired the ‘impressive tower’ but felt its prospects of survival were ‘nil’. As she put the finishing touches to her text a friend wrote with news of the tower’s demise, and she concluded her account of the ‘spectacular’ folly with the depressing phrase ‘Demolished May 1973’.

What makes this particularly sad is that the Rookesbury estate has had the misfortune to lose two fine towers. The view from an earlier tower was admired by the theatrical impresario Tate Wilkinson in 1759 when he visted the Garnier family at Rookesbury. He found David Garrick there and the actor, being younger than his host, gave Wilkinson a tour of the house and gardens, skipping around like a ‘lad of twenty’.

Wilkinson wrote that Garnier had built the tower for ‘study, curiosity, and prospect’ and, as he compares the prospect favourably to one he had seen nearby, we know the view took in the Isle of Wight, the ‘ocean’ and shipping. This tower is shown on an estate map of 1756 and on Taylor’s County map of 1759 as ‘Temple’ (above) and it too stood east of the house. The Flâneuse has been unable to conclude if the belvederes stood on the same site, and sadly no trace remains of either tower.

Rookesbury was a school for many years but is now a wedding and events venue. There’s more information here.

Thank you for reading. As always, further information and general thoughts are very welcome – you can get in touch via the comments box at the foot of the page. A reminder that your contact details remain confidential, only your name will appear.

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 obelisk was erected in 1748-49 to the design of the local architect William Hiorne. It carries no inscription, which means that historians have had to ponder what it might commemorate. The most likely suggestion is that Archer (1695-1768) built it to mark his elevation to the peerage as Baron Archer in 1747. Or perhaps it simply had the double purpose of being a ‘striking object’ from the house, and a reminder to those walking or riding in the park to stop and look back at the mansion and grounds, the view being ‘good from the obelisk’.

Lady Luxborough, of nearby Barrells, took a keen interest in the architectural enterprises of her landed neighbours, and in 1749 wrote to a friend that she was dining with Lord Archer and intended to judge for herself how the obelisk looked from the house – another of her acquaintance had told her it was too tapered to have a good effect. Lady Luxborough also noted that Archer’s obelisk was to carry a finial in the form of a gilded globe and cross.

The ‘cross’, as erected, was more accurately described in a contemporary fragment as a ‘large Star of Lead Gilt’, which would have glistened in the sun, making the obelisk even more of an eye-catcher.

The estate was sold in 1825 by the famed auctioneer George Robins, who is remembered for his sales patter. After the Umberslade sale one paper wrote that they would have to paraphrase his opening remarks, or it would ‘occupy a considerable portion of this column’. Robins became wealthy from his trade and was celebrated as:

George Robins, of auction renown,
Who made a great fortune by knocking things down.

Umberslade Park, complete with ‘Obelisk’, was knocked down to Mr Edward Bolton King. He stayed until 1846 when a change of occupier must have led to a number of famous faces gazing upon the obelisk from the windows of the mansion. The hall became a Hydropathic Establishment under the direction of Dr Edward Johnson, and his patients for the water cure included Alfred Tennyson, Florence Nightingale and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.

The lack of inscription gave the community the chance to add their own fanciful histories to the structure. In 1929 the local vicar wrote that one of his parishioners was certain that Lord Archer’s favourite hunter was buried underneath the obelisk, whilst another old resident was convinced it commemorated a member of Lord Archer’s family who had taken their own life. Another source notes that the obelisk is supposed to mark the spot where Warwickshire’s last coven of witches gathered.

The obelisk still carried its sphere and star finial in 1966, but by 1974 the star could be viewed at closer quarters, as it lay crumpled on the ground. Its current whereabouts are unknown: hopefully it is tucked in the corner of a store somewhere, but as it was made of lead the Flâneuse fears it is long gone.

The obelisk remains an eye-catcher, but not for the inhabitants of Umberslade Hall. The mansion was divided into apartments after being sold by the Muntz family, owners of the estate since the late nineteenth century, who continue to own much of the parkland. The M40 cuts between the mansion and the obelisk, and mature trees block the view from the hall. So it is motorists who get the prime view, albeit fleetingly and without the option to linger and appreciate it.  You can however leave the motorway and head for Pound House Lane, from where a footpath gets you close to the obelisk (grade II).

Although the base and lower half of the needle were swamped with ivy in the early years of this century, the vegetation has since been cleared and the obelisk looks rather fine.

The Flâneuse acknowledges the work of Dr Michael Cousins, whose article on the early history of the obelisk appeared in Follies (the magazine of the Folly Fellowship) in Spring 2006 (No. 63).

Thank you for reading. As ever, your thoughts are very welcome. Simply scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page to get in touch.

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.

George Finch (1752-1826) succeeded his uncle as the 9th Earl of Winchelsea in 1769. The Burley-on-the-Hill estate that he inherited included the elegant mansion on its hilltop site, a building which will be familiar to anyone who has driven near Oakham in Rutland.

The parkland was home to a vast wood, cut through with straight rides in a star shape by a previous generation. In one of the segments of the woodland Finch built a summerhouse in the form of a hermit’s abode. The floor was a mosaic of pebbles and the knucklebones of sheep, and featured a ‘W’ for Winchelsea and the date 1807, which is assumed to be the date of construction.

In 1858 a local newspaper described the Hermitage as ‘an object of interest and amusement’ and encouraged readers to walk the ‘narrow and meandering’ path through the woods to find the rustic cottage, which was built almost entirely of wood except for a huge chimney built of rough stones. There were two rooms – a bedroom with wooden bed and straw mattress covered with sacking, and a front parlour. The centrepiece of this room was a ‘huge block of wood’ which served as a table. The table was by that date already covered in graffiti, as the many visitors had carved their names or initials into the surface. Despite this vandalism, the Hermitage remained ‘constantly open for inspection’.

The same account introduces the first ‘history’ of the building. In brief, a man wanted by debt-collectors went into hiding in Burley Woods (he is not named in the report but locally he is remembered as a Mr Booth or a Mr Bennett). Being ‘sufficiently versed in construction’, he built the ‘humble tabernacle’ and only ventured out occasionally for provisions. Eventually, the bailiff found his secret hideout and tried to take him into custody, but the fugitive locked the bailiff in the hermitage and ran for it. The bailiff, being a stout man, was allegedly stuck in the cottage for days until rescuers found him, much to the amusement of the locals.

An alternative version of the tale has the lurid twist that the fugitive was in fact a murderer. To atone for his crime he sequestered himself in the woods and lived as a hermit, bound by oath not to speak to his fellow men. A short distance from the Hermitage was a smaller rustic shelter called Soloman’s Hut, and according to the legend this is where food was left for the hermit to collect.

Still more diabolical is the history recounted in 1911, which has an ancestor of the Finch family selling his soul to the devil. When Satan tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to keep his word, a deal was struck that the bond would be broken when a Finch had spent 7 years in solitary confinement in the Hermitage. Until this was accomplished the devil would retain his hold over the family. The report concluded that ‘within living memory’ one member of the family had managed two years of isolation before he ‘lost his reason’. Clearly the writer didn’t believe a word of the nonsense he was feeding to his readers, and he concludes with the anti-climactic ‘At any rate, it is a fact that there is at Burley to this day a Hermit’s cell’.

Barbara Jones described the Hermitage in the first edition of Follies and Grottoes in 1953. She thought it a ‘magnificent example’ of the hermitage genre of landscape buildings, and was amazed to find the interior intact. The furnishings included ‘three triangular stools of remarkable rustic discomfort’, and the vast table was still in situ. Her wonderful sketch shows just how intricate the fan-vaulted ceiling was, with branches for the ribs and huge elm bosses.

The Hermitage was visited by architect Neville Hawkes (1910-1988) in 1955 and his photograph shows that by that date the building was looking a little shabby and protected by a barbed-wire fence. Hawkes was probably accompanied on that visit by his son, William (1939-2024), and a year later William and a schoolmate returned to explore the building. Their status as pupils at the local public school of Uppingham gained them permission to visit the Hermitage, and for future historians this would be one of the best decisions the estate office ever made. Young Will, later to train as an architect, recorded the floorpan of the building in a lovely sketch.

Only six years after Will Hawkes visited, the Hermitage was set alight. On Thursday 5 July 1962 the Oakham firemen fought to save the structure, but it was totally destroyed (N.B. Barbara Jones gives the date 1965 which she was given in error by the estate office). A police investigation was launched, but it is unclear if the perpetrators were ever found and the blame is generally pinned on ‘schoolchildren’. The demise of the Hermitage caused great sorrow to an anonymous correspondent with the local paper. The writer remembered picknicking there with ‘the late Squire Finch’ and wished everyone to know that the ‘story of the Burley hermit is a myth’.

Today only a handful of photographs and sketches of the Hermitage survive to record its history, although visitors to the Rutland County Museum might see a miniature model of the building. It was made by local resident William H. Sewell, aka Billy Bennett (1912-1985). The exact date of the model is not known, but it shows the building much as Neville Hawkes saw it in 1955, with the chimney partially collapsed.

The Burley-on-the-Hill estate descended to the Hanbury family, and by the middle of the twentieth century the woods had been closed to the public (there’s an interlude when the estate is owned by the later-disgraced entrepreneur Asil Nadir that needs only the briefest of mentions here). The house was converted into houses by Kit Martin in the 1990s, but the parkland remains with the Hanburys who are currently planning to create an ‘immersive visitor attraction’ called Wild Rutland. Perhaps the Hermitage could be recreated – what could be more wild than a solitary hermit’s cottage?

The Rutland County Museum has a fascinating collection, although please note that the model of the hermitage is not currently on display. Visit before 4 October 2025 to see an exhibition of the works of the artist Rev J.L. Petit (1801-1868) of which the highlight for the present writer was, of course, this view of the folly known as Old John in Bradgate Park in Leicestershire.

Thank you for reading. As ever, your thoughts are very welcome. Please scroll down to find the comments box.

The Thornton Hall estate came into the possession of Thomas Sheppard after his marriage to the heiress Elizabeth Cotton in 1774. Sheppard considered the church of St Michael and All Angels, close to the hall, to be outdated and cluttered. As part of a major restoration he dismantled an ancient tomb, with the ornate side panels becoming features of a grotto in a sequestered spot in the gardens.

The church had been home to the ancient tomb of the Ingylton family, described in the 1755 county history of Buckinghamshire by Browne Willis as a ‘very handsome Altar Tomb of Stone’, for centuries. The tomb featured reliefs of Ingylton himself (he died in 1472) accompanied by his three wives, six sons and ten daughters.

In 1783 Sheppard (1741-1821) asked permission to demolish parts of the church and rebuild it in a ‘more regular and commodious’ manner. This he did out of a ‘pious and charitable disposition’, and at his own expense, with the ‘unanimous consent’ of the Rector and parishioners. A faculty was granted to allow the work to proceed. Sadly there is no mention of the tomb in the legal papers, and the plan shown to the Archdeacon does not seem to survive, but it would seem likely that the tomb was moved around the same date.

In 1801 it was recorded in The Gentleman’s Magazine that the church had been ‘repaired and beautified’ and was now a ‘neat uniform building’. In 1806 Daniel Lysons wrote in Magna Britannia that the church had been ‘neatly and commodiously fitted up’, but he thought that ‘the antiquary will regret the removal of the ancient monuments’.  At that date all that was left of the Ingylton tomb were the brass figures of Ingylton and his family that had decorated the top of the tomb. These were now set into the floor of the church, and Lysons thought that the ‘remarkably fine’ effigies would soon suffer wear.

Neither of these early histories records that the ornate carved slabs, which formed the sides of the tomb, had by that date been carted to a corner of his grounds where they became features of a building known as the ‘Grotto’.

Thornton Hall was remodelled by Sheppard’s descendants in the first years of the 1850s, and remained with the family until towards the end of that century. It passed through further owners until in 1917 it was purchased for use as a convent school for girls. On occasions Benediction was given from an altar in a shrine in ‘one of the loveliest settings’, but it is impossible to be certain that this was the grotto.

It was not until the later years of the 1940s that antiquarians from the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society set out in search of the lost tomb. They had been alerted to its presence by Major Henry Owen Evans (1898-1966), an authority on monumental brasses. On Boxing Day 1945 he visited the church to see the brass from the Ingylton tomb and locate the ‘grotto’ where the rest of the tomb was reputed to be found.

Intrigued, the formidable Miss Cicely Baker (1900-1980), stalwart of the archaeological society, made her own arrangements to visit. Accompanied by one of the order, she and a friend waded though ‘yards of nettles’ to find the ‘summer-house’. Her bare-legged companion ‘suffered agonies in the name of archaeology’, whilst the nun simply strode through in her long habit.

The grotto was found to be ‘semi-ruinous’ and it was decided that the tomb must be returned to the church. Miss Baker was worried that ‘an army of Bishops’ would be required to gain permission, but things moved quickly and, with the Mother Superior at Thornton College amenable to the plan, the Bucks Archaeological Society launched an appeal for funds. Thanks to the Morris Fund of the Society of Antiquaries meeting the entire costs of around £70, the restoration was carried out under the superintendence of the archaeologist and writer E. Clive Rouse (1901-1997). By the end of 1948 the work was finished ‘with complete success and spectacular effect’.

With the ancient tomb the focus of their efforts, no-one seems to have been troubled by what might happen to the already deteriorating grotto, which was presumably further weakened by the removal of the carved slabs. The photograph at the top of the page accompanied an article in Follies, the magazine of the Folly Fellowship, more than thirty years ago in 1991. At that date the author, Tom Sargant, recorded that the grotto was ‘unloved and falling slowly into the bushes’. The roof of the semi-circular room at the back of the grotto, which was originally topped with a pinnacle ‘like a witch’s hat’ had collapsed (when Miss Baker visited she thought that this curious design was a sure sign that this was a folly, or ‘somebody’s whim’).

It is heartening to report that the grotto, protected within the grounds of the school, has not suffered from further degradation, and remains much as it did in 1991 – although action is needed to secure it for the future.

There is no public access to the grounds of Thornton College, but the church of St Michael and All Angels is now vested in the Churches Conservation Trust and can be visited.

Thanks to the team at Thornton College for their help with this post. The Flâneuse also acknowledges the work of the Milton Keynes Heritage Association, whose website pointed her in the right direction.

Your comments are always welcome, and you can get in touch via the comments box at the foot of the page. Thank you for reading.

Travellers on the M6 might have called in to Hilton Services to break their journey. Few will know that only a few fields away stands a tall prospect tower, although they may have caught a glimpse of it from the motorway. The belvedere was built in the middle of the eighteenth century by Henry Vernon of Hilton Park in commemoration of the taking of Portobello in 1739.

Hilton Park, ancient seat of the Vernon family, was remodelled in the early decades of the eighteenth century. It stood within a moat and was surrounded by an extensive park in which the Portobello Tower was erected by Henry Vernon (1718-1765) in commemoration of Admiral Vernon’s taking of Portobello (or Porto Bello) in Panama in November 1739. Admiral Vernon was declared a hero for taking the enemy unawares and capturing the important port with a tiny fleet of only six ships.

In the nineteenth century some texts claimed that Henry Vernon was Admiral Vernon’s nephew, but he was in fact a distant relative. Henry Vernon may have appreciated that the Admiral was his namesake, but the tower seems to have been built as a patriotic act to commemorate a naval hero rather than an immediate member of his family.

The fullest description of how the monument came to be is on the tower itself, as recorded by Historic England. A plaque announces that:

THIS TOWER WAS ERECTED BY
HENRY VERNON OF HILTON PARK
BORN 13th SEPTEMBER 1718, DIED 1765
TO COMMEMORATE THE TAKING OF PORTOBELLO
WITH SIX SHIPS OF THE LINE NOV 22nd 1739 BY
ADMIRAL VERNON
BORN 12th NOVEMBER 1684. DIED 1757.
IN 1763 A MONUMENT WAS ERECTED TO
ADMIRAL VERNON IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
A.L.V. 1911

However, as the final line makes clear, that inscription was added by Augustus Leveson Vernon in 1911, perhaps replacing a degraded earlier inscription, and it seems impossible to discover what, if anything, was recorded on the tower before that date. Finding earlier sources of information is not easy – especially as no-one seems to agree on a name for the building, with variants including Vernon Tower, Hilton Monument and Portobello Tower.

At the time of the naval victory Henry Vernon was on the Grand Tour. It is unlikely that work on the tower started until at least 1741, as Vernon was still in Florence in September 1740. Assuming that the inscription is correct, then work must have been complete before Henry Vernon died in 1765. The first pictorial evidence for the monument (found to date) is a map dated 1796 which has a charming little view of the tower.

William Pitt describes Hilton Park in his A Topographical History of Staffordshire, published in 1817. He wrote that the grounds are ‘very pleasant and secluded’ and notes that the ‘Hilton Monument is erected on the highest eminence in the grounds’, but sadly he adds nothing of its history.

Later nineteenth century guides and histories agree that the tower commemorates Admiral Vernon’s success at Portobello, and describe the ‘magnificent landscape that can be seen from the summit’ of the ‘very pretty landmark’. In the first half of the century it is noted as the ‘Vernon Monument’, but later in the century it has become the ‘Vernon Tower’, and this is echoed on the Ordnance Survey maps: on the 1834 and 1886 maps it is ‘The Monument’, but on the 1900 map it has become ‘The Tower’.

In 1955 the Vernon family sold the mansion and surrounding parkland to Sidney Pickard, a local businessman. Pickard’s plan was to build a new house in the grounds and exploit the minerals on the estate. He wasn’t interested in the fine mansion, and in 1958 he sold it to nuns from the Order of St Joseph of Bordeaux who planned to run a ‘guest house’ for elderly people. As well as pocketing the cash from the sale, the canny Pickard was counting on the nuns reviving the walled gardens and keeping him and his family supplied with produce. Pickard became unpopular after closing off paths which had long been considered rights of way, but which he asserted were private. It would appear he won the argument, as no public footpaths pass anywhere near the tower today.

A visitor in the 1950s was saddened by the encroaching industry, but could still admire the view from the house. Across the moat (still full of water at that date) was a panorama of ‘lawns, rhododendron banks, silver green cornfields and the Portobello Tower in a grove of trees’.

Although Barbara Jones had been told about the tower, she didn’t manage to see it before she published the second edition of Follies & Grottoes in 1974. Had she visited, she would have found the battlements gone and the tower in a poor condition, as shown above. The nuns left Hilton Hall in 1984 and the house was later used as a Head Office by Tarmac. It is now home to serviced offices and meeting rooms.

Meanwhile the surrounding parkland had remained in separate ownership, and the monument was left to decline. The tower (Grade II), which is built of stone around a brick core, is now roofless and in a poor condition.

Barbara Jones concluded that the tower ‘might’ be visible from the M6. Today Hilton Park sits in a triangle of land bordered by the M6, the M54 and a minor road, and as the motorways are somewhat busier than in Jones’s day the Flâneuse suggests that one only tries to spot the tower if one is a passenger. The tower stands on private land, and there is no pedestrian access, although it can be seen from the grounds of Hilton Hall. The best view you will get is in this YouTube film.

Another ornamental structure in Hilton Park has been restored. The delightful domed conservatory stands in the gardens close to the house, and is supported by a central column that houses a chimney.

Thanks to Nicholas Kingsley, author of the Landed Families blog, which investigates the landowning families of the British Isles, for confirming the distant family link between Henry Vernon and the Admiral.

Hilton Hall now provides serviced offices and meeting rooms.

As ever, your thoughts and further information are most welcome. There’s a comments box at the foot of the page. Thank you for reading.

In the middle of the eighteenth century William Aislabie began to create a landscape garden on the banks of the River Ure, near the village of Grewelthorpe. In contrast to his grand estate at Studley, a few miles away, there were few manicured lawns or geometric pools, and instead Hackfall was a ‘sequestered and most romantic place’. Dotted around the grounds were summerhouses and shelters, including a dramatic hilltop tower called Mowbray Castle.

Word soon spread that Hackfall was a place worth seeing, and early visitors recorded their admiration for the place: ‘never was there seen a finer assemblage of wild and variegated nature’ wrote a tourist in 1785. Although visitors frequently refer to the ‘imitations of ruins’ in the pleasure grounds (there’s also a sham-ruin banqueting house), the earliest specific reference by a visitor to ‘Mowbray Castle’ found to date is from the 1780s, which tallies with an account in the archive suggesting work was ongoing in 1778.

By 1801 the gardener, who gave tours of the grounds, estimated that around two hundred parties visited each season. The Yorkshire weather was not always kind, but it didn’t spoil the experience. In 1792 Lord Torrington found ‘so much to admire, so much to celebrate’, despite the rain falling ‘in buckets’. And in 1799 another tourist wrote that he knew of no other place that gave so much pleasure’ even though it ‘rained the whole time’.

When first built Mowbray Castle could be seen from almost every spot within the pleasure grounds, and its ‘isolated situation’ was described as having an ‘extremely happy effect’. William Gilpin, whose comments on landscape were widely-read, criticised the buildings at Hackfall, but few were in agreement. In 1796, the Duke of Rutland wrote that ‘We did not find any room for censure’.

A poem written in 1859 suggested that the castle was an ancient fortification:

Now turn thy steps towards the right,
And view that grand imposing sight –
Tis Mowbray Castle, in decay,
The relics of a bygone day.

But Georgian visitors recognised it as a sham, a ‘very excellent imitation of an ancient ruin’, and praised its natural appearance.

Aislabie’s descendants sold Hackfall to a timber merchant in 1933, and much of the woodland was felled. Happily, the folly survived this period of neglect (although the short section of wall with an arch seen in the early images is lost), and was consolidated as part of a masterplan to restore the pleasure grounds and buildings after Hackfall was purchased by the Woodland Trust in 1989 (with strong support from the Hackfall Trust and other local groups). Sadly the vistas to and from the castle are now largely lost because of tree growth.

Around the time the folly was under construction a boy was born who would grow to great fame as an artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775, 250 years ago this week. He visited Hackfall in 1816, and later worked up one of his sketches into a watercolour now in the Wallace Collection, London.

Hackfall is in the care of the Woodland Trust and is freely accessible to walkers.

J.M.W. Turner clearly admired follies – he painted/sketched the tower at Tabley in Cheshire, Cook’s Folly near Bristol and the Gibraltar Tower in Sussex amongst many others. Click the link in red for events planned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth in 1775.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page to share any thoughts.

Wandering in the glorious landscape that is Stourhead in Wiltshire there are vistas to grand classical temples and gothic monuments, but there is also a pastoral scene featuring a pretty little rustic cottage which has inspired artists – from painters to designers of tourist souvenirs – over the centuries.

Stourhead, one of the most famous landscape gardens in Britain, probably needs little introduction here, but in brief it was created by the Hoare family in the eighteenth century. A grand lake is crossed by an elegant bridge, and a walk around the water leads to features including a grotto and classical temples as well as offering vistas to gothic ornaments and a sun-topped obelisk.

The cottage has been described by many names since it was first constructed in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a reference to Pantheon Cottage, and it is also mentioned as the Rustic Cottage or Arcadian Cottage. For many years it was called the Watch Cottage, most likely because it was home to a keeper, but it is now known as the Gothic Cottage. As the watercolour below shows, the picturesque little building was overgrown with creeping plants such as woodbine and clematis, commonly found in cottage gardens.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century the cottage was in frequent use as a summer retreat, with a comfortable sitting room for the ladies of the house. In this period the thatched roof was replaced with stone slates.

In 1946 the Hoare family gave the house and grounds to the National Trust, and the charity’s early guidebooks and maps called the rustic house the Watch Cottage.

The cottage was restored in 2007 and the roof covered with thatch to return it to its original appearance. The Folly Flâneuse dreams of living in such a rural retreat, but only after the crowds have gone home: in 2023-2024 over 370,000 visitors were able to wander around the lake and past the Gothic Cottage. But as an obsessive collector of all things folly, she can gaze upon it in various iterations from the comfort of her desk…

This little pottery model of the ‘Gothick Cottage’ was made for the National Trust by the Boncath Pottery in 1979. The design is by ‘Dorn Williams’ – Miss Dorn Williams produced other decorative and commemorative pieces for the National Trust.

In 1983 Ian Logan Ltd produced a series of tins featuring National Trust properties. Bill Dare produced the illustration used on this tin, which was ‘based on the Gothic Cottage, Stourhead’. Note that both the model above and this tin show the cottage with the slate roof that was in place at the time they were made.

Sometime towards the end of the 1980s the Flâneuse bought a ceramic model of the Gothic Cottage ‘in the tradition of the pastille burners made by the Staffordshire potters early in the nineteenth century’. It was made at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke on Trent, for a company called Recollections Ltd (the recollections of the Flâneuse stretch no further than that). Although the cottage is modelled with a thatched roof, this was acknowledged as artistic licence by the maker.

For more on Stourhead click here.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box if you wish to share any thoughts or further information.