John Cumming Macdona died in 1907 and was remembered as a ‘tornado of energy’. He was born in Dublin in 1839, and after university entered the church and was ordained in 1859. Many years later he decided to read for the bar, before entering politics as a Conservative in 1885. But he was perhaps best known as a ‘famous dog fancier’, and this little tower was built as a tomb for one of his favourites.

Cumming Macdona (as he was always known) lived at Hilbre House in West Kirby on The Wirral, the peninsula bordered by the rivers Mersey and Dee. Hilbre House was a ‘castellated mansion’ which was ‘charmingly situated’ overlooking the Dee and with views across to Wales.

Cumming Macdona was reported to have had 300 dogs in his kennels at one point. He was well-known as both competitor and judge at dog shows and was a good friend of one Mr Cruft. He is credited with introducing the St Bernard breed to England, and his caricature in Vanity Fair magazine shows him as ‘St Bernards’ in a rough fur coat.

His most famous St Bernard was Tell, the winner of many awards before his retirement in 1870. When Tell died in January 1871 newspapers nationwide noted the ‘Death of a Celebrated Prize Dog’. One noted that Tell had been depicted ‘in a recent Alpine picture by George Earl, the short-haired dog Monarque being his companion’. Although named today as Excelsior, this 1870 painting by Earl seems to match the description.

Cumming Macdona decided to build a tomb in his garden to house the dog’s remains. The vault was constructed under a little circular tower with views out over the river Dee.

The door to the canine crypt was guarded with a stone statue of Tell himself, and a plaque records that the little tower was built in memory of the ‘great St Bernard dog’ who had been ‘majestic in appearance, noble in character, and of undaunted courage’.

Some sources state that Tell’s courage was proved when he rescued his master from the sea, after which feat he expired, but there don’t seem to be any contemporary references to such an event.

As old postcards show, the grounds of Hilbre House ran down to the tidal river Dee. Many cards were produced showing the West Kirby promenade at high tide on stormy days, with Tell’s Tower prominent in the background.

The garden was requisitioned during the Second World War and became home to gun emplacements. Hilbre House remained home to Cumming Macdona’s daughter-in-law (his son died in 1947) until her death at the age of 104 in 1969. Mrs Egerton Macdona was a stalwart of the Conservative party and left Hilbre House to the local MP Selwyn Lloyd. Following his death in 1978 the house (remodelled since Cumming Macdona’s day) was sold and much of its extensive garden was lost to housing development.

The tower still stands, but has now been extended and incorporated into a house on Riverside which has taken the name of the monument – Tell’s Tower. It can be glimpsed through the masts in the yard of the West Kirby Sailing Club.

West Kirby is also home to an elegant stone column topped with a ball. It was erected in 1841 as a beacon for ‘Mariners frequenting the River Mersey and its Vicinity’. The shaft has a beautifully carved inscription and is easy to find – just head to Column Road.

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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. 

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