Enville, together with Hagley and The Leasowes, was one of the triumvirate of famed eighteenth-century Midland estates. The seat of the Earl of Stamford, it was ornamented with a variety of features: some have disappeared over the years, but fortunately many survive. A number of regular readers were intrigued by the image of the exquisite Museum at Enville which appeared in these pages in April, and asked to know more. So the Folly Flâneuse asked The Garden Historian, aka Dr Michael Cousins, to explain its history…

Various contenders for designer of the unusual garden building have surfaced: Sanderson Miller, the gentleman (i.e. amateur) architect who favoured the Gothick style, for one. Discussion with his mason about ‘Ld Stamfords Green House’ was underway in October 1749 and he spent the rest of that month, and most of the next, drawing up a design. Miller (1716-1780), besides his own inclination to the ‘Gothick’, had a well-stocked library to call upon that included Batty Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved (1741/2). This was a pattern book which builders and owners used for ideas, and may have provided inspiration. By June 1750 William Shenstone, the poet and acquaintance of Stamford, was able to note the new ‘Gothick Greenhouse’ at Enville.

By 1756 Miller’s building had been renamed, with the peregrinatious Dr Pococke noting an elegant ‘Gothick Summer house of Mr Millers design’. Clearly then the greenhouse and summerhouse were one and the same building, and although it has been suggested that the first incarnation of the greenhouse was a wooden structure, no evidence has come to light to support this.

Sandy Haynes, the former archivist at and authority on Enville also concludes that the greenhouse and summerhouse were two names for the same building, writing that: ‘Sanderson Miller’s name is mentioned by too many different sources to be discounted and although Pococke refers to it as a summer-house there is no other building at Enville that he could be describing.’ Sadly no records seem to survive in which the exact use of the building is noted, so we don’t know for sure if the building ever housed plants or was simply a pleasure pavilion, or dual purpose.

By 1770 the building had been repurposed as a billiard room. Joseph Heely’s guidebook of c.1773 described it as being fitted out with a billiard table, a chamber organ, and ‘the inside richly adorned with stucco, the cieling remarkably so’. This work is more difficult to date: Haynes believes that it was during the transition to billiard room that the building acquired its elaborate interior plasterwork, and this brings in another contender: Henry Keene (1726-1776). This rare photograph of the inside of the building as it was in March 1952 shows stucco work that bears a strong resemblance to that in the chapel at Hartlebury Castle in Worcestershire, which Keene refitted and reroofed in the Gothic style in around 1750.

The association between Miller and Henry Keene was strong, with the two working together at Hagley in Worcestershire, Chart Park in Surrey and at Arbury in Warwickshire (where Keene probably took up reins as architect following Miller’s deteriorating mental ill-health at the end of 1759) and it is possible that he undertook the interior work of Enville’s summerhouse. To add to the naming confusion the summerhouse was referred to as a ‘Gothic room’ in 1759, yet was still being called a greenhouse by a visitor as late as 1777.

In 1846, soon after the 7th Earl of Stamford inherited, it was refurbished as a Museum for the display of ‘shells, fossils and curiosities’, and that name has now stuck for almost two centuries. By the middle of the twentieth century the building had decayed significantly and its plight gained public attention. Ultimately the principal structure was restored and reroofed by William Hawkes of Cave-Browne-Cave architects in 1988-9. The interior awaits restoration.

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

Enville is a private estate but opens very occasionally for special events. Keep an eye on their website for details https://envilleestate.com

Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or further information – scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the comments box. Please note that your email address will not be published – only your name will appear. Thank you for reading, and thank you to Michael for this guest post.

Near the hamlet of Blackborough in Devon’s Blackdown Hills, remnants of the local Whetstone mining industry can be found in the woodland. A battered pile of stones could be assumed to be another relic, but the more curious visitor will be intrigued to discover that it is marked on old maps as ‘Garnsey’s Tower’.

The Garnsey family had lived in the Uffculme area for centuries, and had a seat in the hamlet of Bodmiscombe. Exactly which member of the family built the tower is difficult to discover, and the ‘why’ and ‘when’ remain an only partially solved mystery. A 1938 newspaper report named the builder as John Garnsey, but there were at least three generations of John Garnseys in Uffculme throughout the 18th and well into the 19th century.

What is known for certain is that it was already in decay in 1854, when the polymath Peter Orlando Hutchinson (1810-1897) described it in his diary. On a walk from Uffculme he first visited the whetstone mines: here men dug deep into the hillside to extract the stone called Devonshire Batt, which was then shaped and smoothed and sold as whetstones for sharpening knives. Hutchinson then went on to ‘Garnsey’s Tower’, but his diary account makes it clear that he didn’t know the history of the building.

Hutchinson meticulously measured the diameter of tower, which was twelve feet, and wrote that it was three storeys in height. He was unable to climb it as the floors were ‘ruined and fallen down’. The windows had been blocked to strengthen the structure, but Hutchinson described it as ‘so tottering that it threatens to fall’. Happily, Hutchinson sketched it on the spot, and his watercolour is annotated with some extra information: the tower had fireplaces, suggesting that the Garnseys used the tower as a belvedere and place for refreshments.

Although Hutchinson could not climb the ruinous tower, he did describe the view from a nearby hill, and from that we can conclude that the panorama from the top of the tower would have included views of Dartmoor and the Quantocks, and stretched as far as the sea.

As the 20th century progressed the tower continued to crumble and today a stubby and characterless few courses of stone are all that survive.

Soon after Hutchinson sketched Garnsey’s Tower, he erected an ornament of his own in his Sidmouth garden in Devon. Appalled that sections of the parish church were to be pulled down, he purchased the stone and in 1859 re-erected it in his grounds of his house in Coburg Terrace. The ‘old chancel of Sidmouth church in miniature’ was originally home to Hutchinson’s museum and library, but he later incorporated it into a house, which still stands today. His ‘summerhouse in the tree’, recorded in his diaries, is sadly long gone.

Peter Orlando Hutchinson’s diaries and sketchbooks, which are in Devon Record Office (South West Heritage Trust), have been digitised (an admirable project) and are are hosted on the East Devon AONB website https://www.eastdevonaonb.org.uk/ourwork/projects/peter-orlando-hutchinson

Thank you for reading. If you wish to share any thoughts or further information please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page. 

In the late 19th century Braystones was a peaceful hamlet close to the Cumberland coast with views out across the Irish Sea. It was here that William Henry Watson built a tower to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. Half a century later, the view would change dramatically: were one able to climb the tower today the eye would be first caught by the great mass that is the Sellafield Nuclear Plant.

William Henry Watson (1859-1934) was the son of a Bolton ‘analytical chemist’, Henry Hough Watson (1810-1886), whose success had enabled him to buy a seaside retreat at Braystones, ten miles south of Whitehaven, which was newly accessible with the coming of the railway. Henry Hough Watson, a Fellow of the Chemical Society, was chemist to the Bolton Gas Company, and advisor to many of the waterworks companies supplying fresh water to Lancashire towns. But he was best known locally as the scientist the police turned to in cases of murder by poisoning, most of which were reported in lurid detail in the local papers.

William Henry Watson also trained as an analytical chemist, but with his father’s wealth behind him he was able to live the life of a gentleman. As well as being a dedicated public servant, he could indulge his interests in geology, meteorology, painting, photography, and the antique.

He was also devoted to his monarch, and as the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne approached, he decided to mark the occasion with a 30 foot high tower. Either side of the door stood a pair of cannon which were apparently sent from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich and ‘bearing date the year of Waterloo’. From the rooftop the views (with the usual proviso ‘on a clear day’) took in Scafell Pike, St Bees Head, the Isle of Man and the ‘Scotch hills’. A plaque records that the tower was erected:

IN HONOUR OF THE QUEEN, AND IN COMMEMORATION OF HER DIAMOND JUBILEE, SIXTY YEARS REIGN, 1837-1897, OF HER GLORIOUS MAJESTY VICTORIA, QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, THIS TOWER WAS ERECTED BY WILLIAM HENRY WATSON, OF BRAYSTONES ESQUIRE, AND OPENED BY JOHN QUAYLE, FOR THIRTY-SIX YEARS OVERSEER OF THIS PARISH, AND BY THOMAS JENKINSON AND EDWARD STEELE, CHAIRMAN AND VICE-CHAIRMAN OF THE FIRST PARISH COUNCIL. THE 22nd DAY JUNE 1897

The rather austere tower was officially opened on Tuesday 22 June, the day of the Jubilee, and there were great celebrations. The proceedings began at noon with the firing of a signal rocket, and after the speeches a choir of schoolchildren sang hymns from the top of the tower, before a magnificent firework finale.

As well as honouring his monarch, Watson had also built the tower to house his ‘collection of antiquarian objects’. In 1899 the contents of the nearby Distington Museum were sold, and Watson bought pieces for his collection. Other items came from a variety of sources: stone troughs were unearthed nearby and neolithic axe-heads and stone tools were found when the local tarn was drained. Most curious was an accession in 1902: men working for G. Patrickson of Ulverston found ‘what is supposed to be a fossilised human foot’, and it was ceremoniously presented to the museum.

In 1920 Watson added a second plaque to the tower commemorating the local men who lost their lives in the First World War, and honouring those who served and survived.

Watson died at Braystones in May 1934 and was buried in nearby St Bridget’s, Beckermet. His gravestone, now a little overgrown, records his dedication to public service:

WILLIAM HENRY WATSON
OF BRAYSTONES,
JUSTICE OF THE PEACE FOR THIS COUNTY
YOUNGER SON OF
HENRY HOUGH AND JANE WATSON.
HE WAS A MEMBER OF THE CUMBERLAND
COUNTY COUNCIL, & OF THE STANDING
JOINT & POLICE COMMITTEES OF THIS
COUNTY, & FOR 39 YEARS , OF THE
WHITEHAVEN UNION BOARD OF GUARDIANS
DISTRICT COUNCIL. ALSO ONE OF THE
PERMANENT COMMITTEE OF THE BRITISH
ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF
SCIENCE , & A FELLOW OF THE GEOLOGICAL
& CHEMICAL SOCIETIES OF LONDON
BORN MARCH 15TH 1859
DIED MAY 19TH 1934

Who wrote this magnificent account of his achievements? His family? A fellow member of one of the many committees? No! It is entirely autobiographical. So determined was Watson to ensure his work was remembered, that he had his entry on the family gravestone carved during his lifetime, leaving only the date of his death to be added after his demise. The story reached the press, and far away on the opposite coast the Hull Daily Mail ran the story under the headline ‘Epitaph Carved in Advance: How a Magistrate Made Sure’.

Little more than a decade after Wilson’s death, the tranquil hamlet of Braystones would be overshadowed by the development of the nuclear plant at Windscale, later renamed Sellafield. Today the Jubilee Tower is an empty shell, with no public access allowed, although it is easily viewed from the roadside.

The Beacon Museum in Whitehaven has 2 portraits of Wilson (not on display). After a truly determined attempt The Folly Flâneuse failed to get permission to feature one in this piece, but you can see him here  https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/william-henry-watson-143335

Thanks for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box if you have any thoughts or further information.