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 Perhaps he was using outdated information?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.

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In the 1850s John Tingey, a Norfolk merchant with a passion for agriculture, began to develop a small estate in the village of Little Ellingham near Attleborough, in Norfolk. Despite investing heavily in new buildings and technology, he was not the owner of the land, and claimed his vast complex of farm buildings was the largest range ‘ever erected by a tenant farmer in England’. But the practical Tingey wasn’t averse to a little bit of ornament, as this clock tower/cottage curiosity attests.

In around 1855 Tingey (c.1810-1874) commissioned the London-based architect Daniel Cubitt Nichols (1825-1895) to design his model farm. Nichols is not a well-known architect, and it is not clear how Tingey was introduced to his work, or how much input Tingey himself had in the design of such a quirky structure. The design for the ‘cottages and clock tower’ was published in The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal in 1857. From that publication we learn that Nichols had also designed a new house for Tingey which at that date was ‘not yet finished’.

The cottages were designed to house a gardener and a groom, and the finishing touch was to be a ‘very valuable’ clock. The article hints that the clock and chimes may have been rescued from elsewhere, as the architect was ‘not allowed’ to make any alterations to the bell-chamber, but simply to ‘re-erect’ it.

The hall and clock tower cottages were constructed using bricks and tiles fired on the estate, with stone only making an appearance for doorsteps. Gault bricks of a pale yellow/buff colour are the principal material, with dressings in red brick, and in 1883 the completed ‘handsome mansion of red and white brick’ was noted in a gazetteer, as was the clock tower in its ‘pleasure grounds’. By the time the estate was offered for sale in 1905 the planting was maturing, and the house stood at the end of an avenue drive through a ‘heavily timbered miniature park’.

In 1974 Barbara Jones described the clock tower (it appears never to have been called anything else) as ‘one of the most charming and surprising things anywhere’, and the Folly Flâneuse confesses to a yelp of delight upon catching a first glimpse through the trees. The clock face was in sound condition when Jones saw it in the early 1970s, but it is a little the worse for wear today, although the tower and cottages are in good repair.

The tower, listed at grade II, is a private residence, but can be seen from the roadside. The village is rightly proud of its unique clock tower.

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This fine arch could once be found on the edge of the village of Westwick, but sadly it was pulled down as recently as 1981. Nearby, in a scrappy ribbon of woodland, stands a decrepit brick tower with a square base supporting a round shaft. It is difficult to appreciate that this remnant was once a much-admired eye-catcher and belvedere, which went by the curious title of the Westwick Obelisk.

Dr Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 defined an obelisk as ‘a magnificent high piece of solid marble, or other fine stone, having usually four faces, and lessening upwards by degrees, till it ends in a point like a pyramid’. Clearly the tower at Westwick fails to meet this accepted description, and it has been assumed that the name was used in error by the surveyors who marked it thus on the first Ordnance Survey maps. But this is not the case: it was called the ‘obelisk’ in the earliest known reference: Armstrong’s History and Antiquities of the County of Norfolk, published in 1781. Armstrong notes the ‘obelisk’ and, perhaps aware of the peculiarity of this title, elaborates that it is a ‘tower or belle-view, ninety feet high’. At the top was a glazed lantern ‘fitted up to view an extensive tract of country each way, and the sea-coast for nearly thirty miles’. The building is also named as ‘obelisk’ on maps of Norfolk published in the 1790s.

Westwick was the seat of William Petre (1686-1772) the property having come to him though his 1736 marriage to Elizabeth Berney (1711-1778). Their son, John Berney Petre (1741-1819), must have been laying out a new landscape at Westwick even before he inherited the estate in 1772, for in 1809 he wrote that he been planting there ‘for more than fifty years’. One of his greatest achievements was the construction of a sinuous lake which curved round the ancient church of St Botolph, making it a picturesque feature of the landscape. When William Watts described Westwick in his Seats of the Gentry (published between 1779 and 1786), he described the major civil engineering that allowed the piece of water to be created: two Archimedes Screws, powered by a windmill, pumped water up from a reservoir.

In his text Watts avoided using the misleading word obelisk, and instead described the ‘ornamental building, or gazebo’, built by Petre ‘some Years since’ which was ‘remarkable for the fine prospect it affords’. The plate of the house and gazebo, was drawn by T. Hearne and engraved by Watts. More interesting is the note in the text to say that the drawing was based on a sketch by ‘H. Repton Esq.’ Humphry Repton was then living not far away at Sustead Hall, and was yet to formally embark on his career as a ‘landscape gardener’, but he must, at the very least, have taken notice of the major engineering and landscaping project at Westwick.

Petre won medals from the Society of Arts for his planting, and in 1809 was still enlarging his woods. In that year he wrote that when his current project was complete he would have created ‘a plantation of five hundred acres with a five-mile drive through it’.

The Westwick Obelisk continued to be a popular attraction throughout the 19th century, when the grounds were opened up to clubs and societies. The Churchman’s Club visited in 1877 and members admired the view from the top of the obelisk. Hasbro’ (Happisburgh) lighthouse could be seen, as well as ‘smoke of the coast-wise steamers, and the top-sails of passing vessels’.

The dilapidated obelisk is today engulfed in trees, so that its purpose as an eye-catcher and belvedere has been completely lost, even in deepest winter. Not that one would attempt to climb it, as the lantern superstructure has largely disappeared, and what survives is in poor condition. And as can be seen, the Westwick Estate does not encourage visitors.

The obelisk might be in a sorry state today, but it does at least survive, unlike its complementary adornment a short distance away. At the former entrance to the park is a pair of very attractive lodges: until 1981 they flanked a handsome arch, which like the obelisk and the lodges was decorated with pebble rustication and knapped flint. Discussions were underway to protect the arch (which was in a dangerous condition) as a listed building, but the owner pressed ahead with demolition before the process could be completed, and within a day no trace was left. The lovely lodges survive astride the B1150 Norwich Road.

The only trace of the arch today is a view of it, and the obelisk, on the very charming village sign.

For more of George Plunkett’s photographs of old Norfolk visit http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

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At Salthouse, on the Norfolk coast, there once stood a rather doleful looking little building. It was built by Onesipherus Randall (1798-1873), a local boy who became a London publican and then made a fortune in property speculation: in a superb case of nominative determinism Onesipherus means ‘bringing profit’.

Randall’s main residence was in Poplar, East London, where he developed residential property, but in around 1861 he bought a house in Holt called Woodlands (now part of Gresham’s School), and in 1870 he bought the Manor of Kelling and Salthouse. When he built the folly that bore his name is less clear.

The 1838 tithe map for Salthouse shows ‘Lodge and Greenburrow Hills’, close to the shore of the ‘German Ocean’, as the property of Phoebe Maria Girdleton, whose family owned nearby Kelling Hall. The 1st series Ordnance Survey map of 1841 shows ‘Old Lodge’ on ‘Lodge Hill’, so there was a building of some description on the site by then. An exact date for Randall’s association with the folly seems hard to find, and the first account discovered to date that specifically links him to the building is 5 years after his death, when it is described as ‘the house built […] by the late O. Randall Esq.’ Presumably Randall used it as a beach retreat, but no evidence has been found. It did however go on to have a very interesting, and practical, purpose.

After Randall’s death in 1873 the building was bought for use as a coastguard station with a cannon (or rocket) ready to fire a Breeches Buoy lifesaving device, quickly becoming known as the Rocket House. The cannon fired a line to a stricken boat – the line was attached to the mast and allowed passengers to be pulled to safety. The local newspapers reported on the many lives saved, including those onboard the Peter of Riga and the Hey Dick of Goole in 1874. Shortly after the Captain of the Hey Dick, his crew, and his family (‘a woman with a babe at her breast and five children clinging round her’), were rescued rumours began to circulate that the Salthouse rocket brigade was to be disbanded by the Board of Trade. The brigade did not give up, and raised funds locally to buy their own kit, using it to save the crew of the John & Harriet in 1878.‘Why the rocket apparatus should be removed from Salthouse when there are men ready and willing to work it […] is difficult to understand’, was the perplexed comment of the Norfolk Chronicle’s reporter.

By the 1920s the building had become a holiday home and was marked on the Ordnance Survey maps as Beach Lodge, although still known locally as ‘Randall’s Folly’ or the ‘Old Rocket House’. In 1931 it was offered for sale: the ‘unique situation overlooking the sea’ came with 2 acres of land, and the agents thought it ideal for pursuits such as fishing and shooting.

Over the winter of 1950-51 the folly was home to the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) and her poet partner Valentine Ackland (1906-1969), both of whom enjoyed sojourns on the Norfolk coast. They were looking for a seaside rental and, loving the building on first sight, ‘instantly decided to take it – much to the bewildered exhilaration of the owners, who do not often find such maniacs’. The eccentric house, by now known as the Great Eye Folly (after the mound of land on which it stood), had no drinking water, but did have a Bechstein, and the couple were very happy there while Warner worked on her last novel, The Flint Anchor.*

In November 1950 Warner wrote that she would like to live there forever, but accepted that no one would be that lucky, ‘for in five years the sea will have eaten it.’ Sadly she was over-optimistic. There was a great flood in January 1953, and Warner saw an aerial photograph of the devastation in her newspaper. She recognised the village of Salthouse, and could see that ‘crazy Great Eye Folly, right on the sea edge, still stands’. Sadly, she was only partly right: what she couldn’t have seen in the birdseye view was that half of the building had been washed away in the storm, and the remainder was deemed unsafe and demolished soon after.

Local fisherman-turned-artist John Craske also captured the Breeches Buoy process in action in the unusual medium of embroidery. Craske (1881-1943) was in poor health, and when painting became too much for him he began to stitch, an activity he could manage from his bed. ‘Rescue by Breeches Buoy’, showing one of the cannon-fired lines in use, was appropriately in the collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. It is now in the care of Britten Pears Arts, Warner being a great friend of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.

Onesipherous Randall, he of the memorable name, is largely forgotten. Sylvia Townsend Warner remains such a local hero that one of the Coasthopper buses that serve the north Norfolk coast is named after her.

* The Folly Flâneuse diligently read the novel, hoping that a thinly-disguised version of the folly might make an appearance. Sadly not, although there is the briefest of mentions of a shell-encrusted summerhouse, orangery, chapel, and mausoleum.

There’s a photo of the folly after the storm here www.salthousehistory.co.uk/1953(2).html

For more on John Craske see A Life in Threads by Julia Blackburn (2015).

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Not folly, but definitely landscape ornament, The Folly Flâneuse was surprised  to find two ziggurats on a recent damp, but exhilarating, jaunt to East Anglia. Built more than two centuries apart, both were influenced by the architecture of Mesopotamia where the ziggurat was a temple in the form of a stepped pyramid, each level raising it closer to heaven. 

The earlier structure was built in around 1790 by Samuel Boycatt and takes the form of a most unusual church tower. Boycatt was the rector of St Mary’s and is said to have rebuilt the church tower, in the form of a stepped ziggurat pyramid, based on a drawing sent home from Mesopotamia by his son William, who was on the Grand Tour. The tower was to be the family mausoleum, but also proclaimed the importance of the family from afar and became a landmark for sailors on the River Waveney which passes close to the church. The Boycatt name had become Boycott by 1841, and entered the British language soon after when William’s descendant, Charles Cunningham Boycott, increased the rent of tenants on the Irish estate he managed. In response he was ostracised, or as it came to be known, boycotted.

Further north is Gunton Park, a wonderful estate with stunning mansion, Robert Adam church, and acres of deer park. It is also home to one of The Folly Flâneuse’s favourite hostelries, The Gunton Arms. Owned and restored by art dealer Ivor Braka, it is furnished with an amazing selection of artworks from his collection. There are pieces outside in the park too; deer saunter nonchalantly past a lone Gormley figure, and show little interest in a Caro. Often a group can be seen close to a Sol LeWitt structure, a five metre high four sided pyramid built of concrete blocks. LeWitt designed a number of such structures from the 1960s onwards and, like Boycott, drew some inspiration from ancient Mesopotamia.

The Folly Flâneuse does not usually address matters of exact location in these pages, as the thrill of the chase is an essential component of folly-spotting, but in this case a word of warning is required. Check a map. Burgh St Peter parish church is not in the village of the same name but a good two miles away.