This little sham castle, once on an open hillside but now surrounded by trees, was erected in the grounds of a house called Tan-y-Coed (Foot of the Woods) in Old Colwyn. It was the home of Charles Frederick Woodall, a retired woollen draper from Manchester, who settled on the North Wales coast in the 1880s for the benefit of his health. He created pretty gardens around his house, with the sham castle the most prominent feature. The tower is a prime example of a folly where the tales told about it don’t bear close scrutiny…

One will read that it was home to ‘Sir Charles Woodall’, a Manchester ‘shipping tycoon’. But in reality Woodall (1841-1901) was never given a peerage, and he described himself as a ‘Retired Woollen Merchant’ on the census returns. It is also said that Woodall built the tower because he enjoyed pipe-smoking. Apparently, his wife would not allow him to smoke in the house, so as the story goes he had to retreat to the tower to enjoy a smoke ‘in peace’. This is particularly curious as Woodall was a bachelor. Local histories record that Woodall was often seen walking up to the tower in his velvet smoking jacket and cap – but if he did it was not at the behest of a nagging spouse. Less dramatically, it was presumably built as a belvedere with views out to sea and as a decorative object in Woodall’s gardens.

What is known is that Woodall was in a position to spend money on creating his retirement seat in the ‘beautiful and sheltered dingle’. In 1893 he added a pretty coach house, which survives today, and by 1890 he had employed the respected Richardsons of Darlington to build glasshouses. The tower must also have been built in the 1880s, as it is shown on the 6″ Ordnance Survey map revised in 1888 and published in 1900.

Woodall died in February 1901 and, after a memorial service at St Catherine’s, Old Colwyn, was buried in a family plot in Manchester Southern Cemetery (the new church of St John’s in Old Colwyn, for which Woodall was the largest subscriber to the building fund, was just across the road from Tan-y-Coed but at the time of his death it was incomplete).

In the 1920s the Tan-y-Coed property was bought by the local authority for the ‘purposes of road improvement and provision of public gardens’. The tower became a shelter enjoyed by local residents, and ice-creams were sold from an adjacent kiosk. Woodall’s house was later demolished.

From the earliest days of the park there were problems with vandalism: the windows were broken and had to be fitted with iron bars and in 1947 the tower was boarded-up after hooligans lit fires on the oak floors.

In the early 1990s a campaign was launched to save the tower after Colwyn Bay Borough Council announced plans to demolish it. CADW (the Welsh Government’s historic environment service) listed the tower at Grade II as ‘an ornamental structure of considerable local importance as an eye-catcher in Tan-y-Coed gardens’ and funding was found (with the usual ups and downs) to restore the building under the auspices of the Clwyd Historic Buildings Preservation Trust. The money was to be recouped when the tower was sold as a ‘delightful studio apartment’ after the renovation.

The folly remains a private home and, although it is now largely hidden by foliage, the round tower is easy to spot in the public park. The view to the sea that it must once have enjoyed is now blocked by development, including the four lanes of the North Wales Expressway, but this is what Woodall might have seen (minus the distant offshore wind farm).

Thank you for reading. Scroll down to the foot of the page to find the comments box if you would like to share any thoughts.

Close to the little town of Ryde on the north coast of the Isle of Wight stood Appley Towers, a fine seaside villa with views across the Solent to the mainland of Britain. In the later decades of the nineteenth century its new owner added a belvedere on the shore, which he called the Watch Tower.

In 1872 the Appley Towers (sometimes Apley Towers) estate was up for sale, and there was much gossip about who might purchase it. The Hampshire Advertiser suggested in June of that year that the Marquess of Bute had snapped up the estate for £47,000, but in July papers across the country reported that a ‘well-known member of Parliament’ had purchased the ‘magnificent estate’ for £59,950. This was Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), MP for Gateshead since 1841, and knighted in 1865 after serving as Paymaster General and Vice-President of the Board of Trade.

Immediately after purchasing the estate Sir William began to remodel the house and fill the gardens and glasshouses with the finest botanical specimens (soon to be described in all of the smart gardening journals of the period). He built a private pier where his visitors could arrive by yacht, and he contributed handsomely to the costs of building a ‘massive sea wall’ below his estate with a promenade open to all. By the time of his death in 1882 he was rumoured to have spent £70,000 in ‘beautifying the place’.

In this same period he erected a pretty little ‘Watch Tower’ on the sea wall. Sir William commissioned local men to design and build the tower, which was complete by 1876. Over the door is a plaque carved with Hutt’s family crest of a lapwing and the motto Vouloir est Pouvoir – which can be translated as ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. Although Sir William called it the Watch Tower, it quickly became known locally as the Appley Tower.

The architect was Thomas Hellyer and the builder was Isaac Barton, both of Ryde. Hellyer and Barton also worked on remodelling the main house, Appley Towers, including adding the lofty clock tower which, with the Watch Tower, made ‘such a conspicuous figure in the landscape as viewed from the sea’.

After Sir William’s death in 1882 there was speculation that the Prince of Wales was going to buy Appley Towers, but this was soon dismissed as ‘a flim-flam of the wildest kind’. The Hutt family continued to own Appley Towers until 1912, when the property with its ‘View Tower’ was sold to Sir Hedworth Williamson 9th Bt, a wealthy industrialist who entertained members of the royal family at Appley Towers on a number of occasions in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1945 Ryde Borough Council bought the estate with a view to creating a public park, and in the following decade the house was demolished and its site developed for housing. The ‘pudgy little Appley Tower’ (as described by Gwyn Headley in Country Life in 1993) was restored in 2023-2024 in a project led by Natural Enterprise. The tower is now to be open regularly (although reliant on volunteers, and the Flâneuse found it shut, so check before visiting). The area of the former gardens nearest the sea is now a public park.

The tower is listed by Historic England at grade II for its ‘curiosity value’, and so in keeping with such whimsy, and with apologies to Edward Lear…

There was an old gentleman of Ryde,
Whose estate was his joy and his pride.
He thought it quite jolly,
To build a fine folly,
On an esplanade by the seaside.

Sir William Hutt, by the way, has interesting folly connections if you have time for a couple of detours…

In 1831 Hutt married as his first wife Mary, Dowager Countess of Strathmore (died 1860). She had been the mistress of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, and their relationship was legitimised when he married her from his deathbed in 1820, leaving her a considerable fortune and the mansion at Gibside as her home for life. Hutt had been tutor to her son, John Bowes (1811-1885), at Cambridge and thus met Mary. Gibside, with its landscape dotted with follies, was the couple’s home when Hutt was MP for Gateshead. Hutt advised and encouraged his stepson when he and his wife, Josephine, embarked on a project to create a museum in Barnard Castle, Co. Durham – famed today as the Bowes Museum. A new exhibition inspired by Josephine’s collecting has just opened at the Bowes Museum.

In 1842 when Hutt was Member of Parliament for Gateshead, he was part of the committee convened to decide how to commemorate the life of John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham. It was Hutt who put forward the resolution that suggested a monument of an ‘architectural character’ on Penshaw Hill, near the late earl’s Lambton Castle estate. This eventually took shape as the grand Penshaw Monument, loosely modelled on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens.

Your thoughts are always welcome. Please scroll down to the comments box to share any observations, and thank you for reading.

In the first half of the 1760s Thomas Farr, a Bristol merchant, bought land at Henbury near Bristol, which included the prominent eminence called ‘Blaize Hill’. In 1766 he commissioned designs from the architect Robert Mylne for a sham castle eye-catcher to top the hill.

Early Bristol historians describe the hill as the site of a Roman camp, and Farr was said to have dug up ‘great quantities’ of coins when the foundations for the castle were made. It was also said to have housed an ancient chapel, and more recently had been home to a summerhouse approached by a formal double-avenue. Farr (1732-1791), a ‘person of exquisite taste’, followed fashion and abandoned this straight approach, creating instead meandering serpentine walks and rides which wound through woodland up to the fine new gothic folly.

A single drawing by Robert Mylne (1733-1811) is known to survive, and as it is annotated ‘no.3’ it is assumed that Mylne provided several variant designs. The castle had offices at ground level where the servants could prepare food, and three rooms on the first floor for socialising. The principal circular room was 25 feet in diameter and ‘very highly finished in the Gothic stile’. Stairs in one of the smaller turrets led to the roof, where the views took in ‘many miles’ of the River Severn and the Bristol Channel, as well as a prospect over the surrounding counties and across to Wales. Contemporary sources suggest that Farr would watch his ships arriving in Bristol from the top of his ‘Summer or Pleasure House’, and it was also an eye-catcher, announcing Farr’s elevated status to all who saw it.

Farr’s ambitions for his estate were foiled by bankruptcy in 1778, and he sold the estate to one Dr Denham Skeet. The poet Edward Davies was a guest of Skeet and recorded his visit in verse. This was published in 1783 as Blaise Castle: A Prospective Poem, and he includes a rather disturbing description of the effort required to ascend the footpath to the folly:

The fat and lazy would ne’er reach the Top.
Were there not Seats prepared for them to stop,
And breath [sic], while they their reeking Foreheads mop.
But after various Perils, Stops and Pain,
With trembling Knees, we reach the Castle Plain,
And panting view the Horizon again.

The artist Samuel Hieronymous Grimm visited a few years later (it is not recorded if he walked the tortuous footpath or opted for a sedate carriage ride) and took a number of views of the folly. His sketches show that the door was originally flanked by a pair of sphinx statues, which are sadly no longer in situ.

In 1789 the estate was bought by the Harford family. They built a new mansion, and invited Humphry Repton to remodel the grounds: he suggested raising one of the turrets of the castle to give it a more interesting silhouette, but his advice was not taken.  Tourists were allowed to explore the walks through the woods to the folly, although there were restrictions: one early nineteenth century visitor was unable to persuade (bribe?) the ‘churlish porter’ to allow access on a Sunday.

Blaise Castle (the folly soon gave its name to the entire estate) remained in Harford ownership until the early decades of the twentieth century, and by the later nineteenth century the ground floor of Blaise Castle was earning its keep as a residence for estate workers. The family continued to allow access to parties of naturalists, antiquarians and ramblers, and the reports of their visits in the first decade of the twentieth century provide detail of the upper room in the tower. It was by then furnished with a collection of arms and armour, rare old china and furniture, and had ‘beautiful stained glass windows’. Like the earlier tourists, the groups could climb up to the top to appreciate the magnificent scenery.

In 1926 access became available to all when the Bristol Corporation bought the estate as a ‘charming natural playground’ where the city’s citizens might enjoy ‘the beauty with which nature has endowed this place so lavishly’.

As well as the hilltop folly the grounds also featured a castellated lodge, a ‘fairy tale’ thatched lodge and places of ‘childish delight’ such as ‘The Butcher’s Cave’ and ‘The Giant’s Footprint’. In 1949 a Folk Museum was opened in the mansion, and there was also a ‘pleasant restaurant’ where visitors could dine off elegant crockery bearing the arms of the city.

By the 1970s, after years of neglect and abuse by vandals, the folly was in poor condition. The interior had fallen into complete disrepair and, as Barbara Jones noted in her research files, the stained glass had been destroyed ‘by hooligans’.

The exterior fabric was also in a poor condition, and in 1979 the council proposed pulling down the most dangerous section, and preserving the rest as a ‘conserved ruin’. Public opinion was vociferously in favour of restoring the whole castle, and in March 1981 a local paper could announce that the dangerous turret was currently being rebuilt and that it was ‘hoped to fully restore this fanciful building over the next three years’.

Today an active community charity, Friends of Blaise (born out of the campaign to see the castle restored in the 1980s) supports the city council in their efforts to maintain the estate. The volunteers open the castle (grade II*) to the public on certain days in the warmer months, but you can walk up to it at any time. There’s a walking guide here. There’s still a museum and a cafe – just don’t expect the fancy china.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box if you would like to share any thoughts.

In 1833 Other Archer Windsor, 6th Earl of Plymouth, died. Almost immediately there were calls to erect a monument in his honour, and a public subscription was raised. With funds in place, the foundation stone was laid in May 1834. The chosen site was on Bromsgrove Lickey, a prominent eminence which would ensure that the obelisk would be an ornament to the landscape and visible from miles around.

Other Archer Windsor, 6th Earl of Plymouth (1789-1833) had a seat at Hewell Grange, in Worcestershire, which had been in the family since the middle of the 16th century, and he seems to have been well-respected locally. Announcing his death in London in July 1833, having just turned 44, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette wrote that the ‘sudden removal of the Noble earl in the midst of life and usefulness, is no less a loss to his county than to the extensive circle and neighbourhood in which he moved’.

The appeal for funds to build a monument was led by members of his former regiment, the Worcestershire Yeomanry Cavalry, but the public were encouraged to donate. By January 1834 about £800 had been collected, and the committee agreed to procure designs and estimates (almost £1000 would be collected in total). The site, on the late earl’s land, was chosen for its ‘elevation and contiguity to the Hewell demesne’.

The foundation stone of the obelisk was laid by Lord Lyttleton of Hagley Hall, Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire, on Thursday 15 May 1834 and a print was issued showing the proposed design. Lyttleton recorded the occasion in his diary, noting the ‘pretty’ design of the monument.

William Bain designed a medal to commemorate the occasion with the inscription Plaudente et Lucente Comitatu – with the approbation and honour of his county. The laying of the foundation stone is noted on the north side of the obelisk, and on the south is the following inscription:

Loudon’s Architectural Magazine announced that the obelisk was to stand 91 feet and 6 inches tall, and was to be built of Anglesey marble. The magazine gave the architect as John Hanson, and the contractor as John Welch, but Hanson sounds suspiciously like the architect Joseph Aloysius Hansom, and the Worcester Journal of 15 May 1834 confirms that the obelisk was designed by Hansom and his partner Edward Welch. Their practice had won the competition to design the new Birmingham Town Hall in 1830, and that too was under construction in Anglesey stone in May 1834 when Hansom and Welch were dramatically declared bankrupt. At that point the financially embarrassed Hansom and Welch seem to have been quietly expunged from the records (the John Welch commissioned to build the monument was Edward’s brother).

The site was within a plantation of larches and firs, some of which were felled to create a broad grassy swathe which allowed ‘as good a general view of the obelisk as possible’. Lord Lyttleton’s diary suggests that the original plan was to have two broad rides to ‘shew the obelisk on its four faces’, but the idea was clearly abandoned.

Throughout the 19th century visitors were welcomed, but only if permission had been granted. In August 1872 the British Medical Association organised a ‘Worcestershire Excursion’ and having seen the ‘splendid gardens’ at Hewell Grange they went via the private drive through Lickey Woods to see the monument. Elijah Walton’s 19th century view captures the romance of the ride.

In the first half of the twentieth century land at Lickey was gradually acquired by Birmingham Corporation. The hills became a popular recreation place for the people of Birmingham and the surrounding area, with trams bringing huge numbers of visitors out of the prosperous, but polluted, city: ‘Lickey for Health, Birmingham for Wealth’ as an old saying goes.

The crumbling grade II listed monument has been patched up over the years, and in the 1950s steel bands were fitted to hold the column together – the Anglesey stone blocks were becoming detached from the hollow brick core. It was fully restored in 1995, when there was controversy over the costs. Although technically within the Hereford and Worcester boundary, the £85,000 costs were largely met by Birmingham City Council as owners of the land. ‘OUTRAGEOUS!’ hollered the headline in the Birmingham Mail when it was revealed that the project had cost ‘cash-strapped Brum’ double the expected sum of £41,000.

Sadly the vistas cut through the woods have long since become overgrown, and the obelisk stands in a clearing encircled by trees. There are no longer views over the countryside, and it has lost its function as an elegant eye-catcher. A third painting by Elijah Walton depicts the lost view from the obelisk, and shows that the Flâneuse was not the only one to visit on a dreary day

The Lickey Hills Country Park remains a popular local attraction https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/20089/parks/406/lickey_hills_country_park

And this website will tell you all you need to know about the area https://thelickeyhills.uk

Thanks to Michael Cousins for sharing the extracts from Lord Lyttleton’s diary

… and thanks to you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts or memories please scroll down to the contact box at the foot of the page to get in touch.

When first built the handsome gazebo in the grounds of Crow Nest in Dewsbury would have had views over the estate’s fine gardens and pleasure grounds. At the end of the 19th century Crow Nest was bought for the people of Dewsbury, and has now been a public park for 130 years. The Temple remains an ornament to the park, but sadly today it has a rather forlorn appearance.

Information about the Crow Nest estate is quite hard to find (and it shouldn’t be confused with Crow Nest at Lightcliffe, which is not far away). We know that in 1733 it was purchased from the Bedford family by Samuel Burroughs (c.1695-1761), a Master in Chancery and author of important texts on the legal system. Upon his death in 1761 the house passed to his recently widowed daughter, Sarah, who arranged for Crow Nest to be let the following year. The ‘exceedingly pleasant house’ was described as ‘fit for a Gentleman’s family’ and came with gardens, orchards and pasture. There is no mention of the temple, although two maps show it was extant at that date.

The first visual evidence for the gazebo is on a plan of the River Calder surveyed by the engineer John Smeaton in 1757 (the house is mistakenly named as ‘Crows Mount’). The gazebo can be seen in a corner of the walled grounds, and traces of these walls can still be seen attached to the temple today. A map dated to c.1766 shows the gazebo and mansion in more detail.

In 1785 Crow Nest was sold to Richard Milnes, but in 1798 he was declared bankrupt, and the estate was once more offered for sale. The ‘Most Valuable and Truly Desirable Estate’ was described as ‘situate upon an eminence, commanding a most extensive view’. It was bought by the Hague family who remodelled the mansion and remained there for almost a century until they sold the estate to Dewsbury Corporation, who wished to create a public park for the townsfolk. The park opened in 1893 with a day of ‘holiday and public rejoicing’.

The town plan of Dewsbury produced by the Ordnance Survey office in 1852 shows the Temple at the end of a long straight path which was terminated at the other end by a summerhouse. At that date it had two adjoining walls, one of which was  connected to an arch, seen in this photograph. Although ‘old castellated arches of Norman design’ were mentioned in 1889, they had disappeared by the time the 25″ map was published in 1894 and the Temple was by then a free standing structure.

The building is not named on the 1850s 6″ Ordnance Survey map, but is called ‘The Temple’ on the 25″ map surveyed in the late 1880s (but not published until 1894). By the time a revised edition of the map was published in 1907, Crow Nest Park had been created with lake and island, bowling green and, of course, a bandstand. The designer, William Cox, incorporated the Temple into the layout of the park, surrounding it with ornamental shrubberies. From the upstairs room of the gazebo there was a panorama of the whole park and the countryside beyond.

A lovely watercolour in the collection of Kirklees Museums calls the building the ‘Observatory’, but it is likely that the term was used in the sense of a belvedere or gazebo, a building from which the view could be admired, rather than as an astronomical tower. Locally the story is told that a tunnel leads from the mansion to the Temple, and that one of the owners of the estate used it to to escape from his bad-tempered wife – a tale attached to more than one folly.

In the early 20th century a group of retired Dewsbury men known as ‘the Veterans’ Parliament’ used the Temple as a shelter in which to meet. Judging by their age the men had probably served in the wars in South Africa, and the park houses a memorial to the friends they lost which was unveiled by Baden-Powell in 1906. By 1937 the men were in their seventies and finding the stairs in the building a challenge. Bemoaning the lack of facilities to ‘mash a pot of tea’ they left for alternative accommodation.

Soon after that date Britain was at war again, and the maintenance of ornamental buildings was not a priority. At date unknown the elegant roof was removed, and it became a rather grand store for park equipment. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘quite elegant’, the Temple was listed at grade II in 1985, but is bricked-up and sadly neglected today.

In 1894 a committee was formed to establish a museum in the mansion, and it was a popular attraction for over a century. Sadly the Dewsbury Museum was closed in 2016 after the council withdrew funding as part of a programme of austerity measures. A long campaign to keep the building in community use was unsuccessful, and the house (grade II) currently stands empty. Crow Nest Park is listed at grade II on the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England.

The Temple delighted the families who made Crow Nest their home for a century and a half, and has been an attractive feature for the visitors to a public park for another 130 years and counting. It is sad to see it neglected today.

Thanks to Katina Bill of Kirklees Museums for her help with this post.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to find the comments box and to share any thoughts.

Soon after the close of the First World War the people of Loughborough began to consider how to commemorate those who had lost their lives in the conflict. The civic dignitaries considered a number of ideas but the proposal of a ‘lofty tower and carillon of bells caught the imagination of a number of eminent municipal people’.

When the idea was put to the townspeople there was great support, and it was decided that the tower should be built in Queen’s Park where ‘the sweet note of the carillon set in beautiful surroundings would prove a solace to many an aching and desolated heart’.

A carillon was thought appropriate for a war memorial in Loughborough for two principal reasons. First, the town was ‘the birthplace of some of the finest bells in existence’. These were produced at Taylor’s Bell Foundry, which survives today: bells have been cast there since 1839 and can be heard throughout the world.

It was also felt that carillons were particularly associated with Flanders, in Belgium, where ‘so many spots were for ever England’ for the Loughborough men who had been killed there.

The tower, now listed at grade II, was designed by Walter John Tapper (1861-1935) who was particularly known for his ecclesiastical work. He served as President of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1927-28 and was Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey from 1928 until his death. He was knighted shortly before his death in 1935. Tapper’s first proposal was rejected as too expensive, so he came up with this new and more affordable design.

An appeal was launched to raise funds for the tower and there were donations from the great and the good of the town as well as everyday folk including ‘1,750 factory girls who gave from their wages’. Work began in late 1921 and the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone was on 22 January 1922. The town was proud that most of the materials and contractors were local to Loughborough. As building work continued companies and individuals enthusiastically offered to sponsor the bells, and almost all are engraved with the name of the donor and often a dedication to a family member who died in the war.

The war memorial was officially opened in front of huge crowds on 22 July 1923. Field Marshall Sir William Robertson performed the ceremonial unveiling before the Bishop of Peterborough announced the dedication. And then of course came the moment they had all been waiting for: the bells began to chime. A programme of music included a piece written by Sir Edward Elgar especially for the occasion as well as his Land of Hope and Glory, Chopin’s March Funèbre and the National Anthem.

The bells are played via a clavier in the chamber below the bells (see the section of the building above) and Eric Jordan was appointed the Borough Carillonneur soon after the tower was opened. As carillons are so rare in Britain he had no experience in playing the bells, but went to Belgium for lessons with that country’s preeminent practitioner Chevalier Jef. Denny (who had played the bells at the opening of the Loughborough war memorial tower). Jordan’s regular recitals were hugely popular and his playing was recorded by His Master’s Voice.

Eric’s playing was recorded in 1928 and you can listen to it here https://archive.org/details/2-jordan-we-carillon-fantasia-popular-songs-hmv-b-2683/3+Jordan+WE+Carillon+-+Mendelssohn+HMV+B+2687.flac

The tower was restored in 2018 and reached its centenary on 22 July 2023 when there was a special service to mark the occasion. Alun Brignull of the Hedgehog Press lives within the sound of the bells, and made this type-picture of the war memorial on the day of the celebrations.

From the start it was planned to establish a museum in the lower rooms and that use continues today with a focus on Loughborough and the two world wars. The museum is open on Thursdays and Sundays in the summer months when the carillon is also played (check the website before visiting) https://www.carillontower.org.uk

And if you’d like your very own carillon you can download a cut-out-and-build model (try and make it a little less wonky than the Flâneuse’s attempt) https://www.carillontower.org.uk/model/tower.pdf

For much more on the history of the tower visit https://www.loughborough-rollofhonour.com/page95.htm

APOLOGIES to subscribers who did not receive an email alert last week. This was due to technical issues which, hopefully, have now been resolved. If you would like to see last week’s post about the Temple of Venus at Harewood please click here https://thefollyflaneuse.com/the-temple-of-venus-harewood-house-west-yorkshire/

Thank you for reading and please scroll down to the very bottom of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or comments.

In the last years of the 19th century John Stuart McCaig decided to erect a monument on a hill overlooking Oban. Whilst a pillar of the  local community, McCaig did not choose a column or obelisk, but instead a colossal circular wall, pierced with gothic windows, giving magnificent views of the harbour and out to sea.

In 1895 McCaig (1823-1902) applied for permission to erect a ‘stone and lime wall and granite tower with freestone dressing’ on a piece of land he owned called Battery Hill. A year later McCaig sold his interest in Oban pier and harbour for £16,500, so he had money to spend, and he made further applications in 1896 and 1897 to add to the wall and increase it in height.

McCaig intended his hilltop project to provide work for local men, so the great wall was built sporadically with work stopping whenever there was employment elsewhere. But by September 1897 a visitor could note that ‘there is rising by degrees a mighty structure’. The tourist was informed that ‘a lofty tower’ would in due course ‘rise from the centre of the gigantic circle’, and whilst that was never built, history has confirmed his opinion that ‘when this is finished Oban will possess a building absolutely unique in the United Kingdom’. A plaque above the entrance records that the tower was

ERECTED IN 1900
BY
JOHN STUART McCAIG
ART CRITIC
AND PHILOSPHICAL ESSAYIST
AND BANKER, OBAN

With his brother, McCaig was appointed agent to the North of Scotland Bank when it opened a branch in Oban in 1873. However it is his work as an art critic and an essayist that McCaig chooses to first highlight on the stone, which is something of a mystery as he appears to have left no published works: a trawl of the catalogues of the National Library of Scotland and the British Library gives no results.

McCaig died suddenly in the summer of 1902 before the planned central tower could be built. However his will stipulated that his estate should fund the erection of 12 statues within ‘Stuart McCaig’s Tower’ representing himself, his parents and his siblings. Scottish sculptors, especially ‘young and rising artists’, were to be commissioned to design the statues: they were to work from photographs of McCaig’s late family, and if images were not available the artists were to ensure the statues had a family likeness. Prizes were to be offered for the best design, with a competition also to design ‘artistic towers’ to stand in prominent positions on McCaig’s estates.

His only surviving sibling Catherine successfully challenged the will. But then in a bizarre twist Catherine too left a will stipulating that bronze statues of the family be erected. This will was also challenged – unsurprisingly, as Catherine had already set a precedent. Two years after Catherine’s death in 1915 the case made headlines across Britain when the court declared that the ‘directions in question were wholly void, having neither reason nor public sentiment in their favour and involving sheer waste of money’. Local feeling seems to have been against the statues, with one paper reporting in 1905 that ‘we doubt the people of Oban will be prepared to give them a welcome.

The McCaig fortune was eventually used to create Catherine McCaig’s Trust Settlement, which continues to offer bursaries and grants today, and the trust did honour Catherine’s request that her trustees would be ‘bound to properly upkeep the McCaig Tower’. In 1961 the trust spent about £4,000 on repairs before handing the tower to Oban Town Council later that decade. The council began a programme of improvements including landscaping (which the Governors of Catherine McCaig’s Trust had ‘never got around to’) and floodlighting. In the 1970s the council drew up plans to erect an historical centre within the tower, and in the 1980s a very ambitious plan to create an arts and conference centre in the shell was proposed, but neither project came to fruition.

Although McCaig’s dream of twelve statues on his great wall was never realised, he has certainly not been forgotten in Oban where the tower is popular with locals and visitors.

Thanks to Jackie Davenport, Archives Officer at Live Argyll for her help with this post. Jackie’s favourite folly is the little watchtower on the hill called Dun na Cuaiche high above Inverary Castle in Argyll (although, as she admits, this is possibly because of the sense of relief you feel when you see it and realise the climb is over).

Thank you for reading. If you have any thoughts or comments please scroll down to the foot of the page to get in touch. 

Early in 1860 the Mayor of Hull, Zachariah Pearson, gave 27 acres of land to the Hull Corporation, on condition that they made an immediate start on laying it out as a public park. Initially known as the People’s Park, it was soon renamed Pearson Park in honour of the Mayor’s munificence. It was formally opened in September 1860, and quickly became a popular destination with all the usual attractions of lake, aviary, refreshment rooms and drinking fountain. But a couple of years after opening a less common feature joined the growing list of attractions in the park: a folly in the form of a sham ruin with a rather fascinating provenance.

To step back in time, the Ruins, as the folly in the park became known, had already been a feature in another Hull attraction. Much of the masonry had first been erected as an eye-catcher in Hull’s Zoological Gardens, a short-lived enterprise that operated for two decades before the money ran out. The Zoo opened in 1840 as a ‘place of resort for healthful exercise’ where the mind was to be stimulated by ‘the picturesque and tasteful arrangement of the grounds and architecture’.

In the early years ‘further architectural embellishments’ were added each season to encourage return visits: there was a Swiss chalet for the goats, a Moorish temple to house the elephants, and a ‘Heathen Temple’ which displayed what were then described as ‘curiosities associated with Buddhist mythology’. Supervising the layout was one of the Vice-presidents of the Zoological Gardens, the architect Henry Francis Lockwood. Lockwood (1811-1878) was then practicing in Hull, but would become famous for his later partnership with William Mawson, which produced buildings such as Bradford Town Hall and the mill, village and church in the model village of Saltaire, also in the West Riding.

Whilst the ruin in the Zoological Gardens was a sham, it was not intended to fool anyone, and was marked on the plan of the gardens as ‘Ruins (Artificial)’. But most of the masonry used was genuinely ancient, and had an excellent provenance, for it was purchased at the auction of surplus ‘reliques’ after the great fire at York Minster in May 1840. Material from the Minster was salvaged after the fire and made into small mementoes such as snuff boxes and candlesticks, but there was also also money to be made from the substantial pieces of timber and masonry that could not be reused when the damaged section of the church was rebuilt.

In 1844 the York auctioneer Mr Vaile informed ‘Antiquarians, Connossieurs [sic], Architects, Builders &c’ that he had been directed by the Restoration Committee of York Minster to sell the ‘Ancient and Valuable Reliques’. Present at the auction was Thomas Dalton Hammond, a Hull chemist and druggist and one of the Honorary Secretaries of the Zoological Society, and when bidding began for the masonry he was quick off the mark and snapped up the first lot. This was an ‘Ancient perforated Stone Parapet from the top of the North-West Tower’ at a cost of one guinea, and Hammond then went on to buy a total of 27 lots. His haul included keystones, quatrefoils, carved flowers and carved lion heads, mouldings, marble flooring and his most expensive purchase, at £1.12.0, was ‘Two Canopies, with Buttresses, Crockets, Springer and Finials complete’ which had been part of the South Side of the Nave. These fragments, as well as decorative masonry from other churches, then began the second phase of their lives as a folly in the Zoological Gardens, but sadly no view is known to survive.

Meanwhile, plans had been progressing for another recreational facility for the people of Hull, and Pearson Park, on the land donated by Pearson, had opened in 1860 to a design by Mr J.C. Niven, the Curator of the town’s Botanical Gardens (Kingston upon Hull did not gain city status in 1897). As the park was being developed the Zoological Gardens were struggling to survive, and eventually failed.

The animals were dispersed, and in 1862 the ‘costly and ornamental buildings’ were offered at auction. The Folly Flâneuse would love to know what happened to the ‘large and handsome’ Elephant House, or the ‘exceedingly beautiful’ Menagerie as well as the many other buildings and artefacts. But we do know that the ‘Ancient Church Architecture’ was bought by Alderman Moss of Hull. With civic funds at his disposal he expended £45 on portions of the ruins: according to the sale catalogue these comprised a ‘fine screen’ from York Minster, as well as fragments from Holy Trinity Church in Hull, and a church at Owthorne (possibly St Nicholas near Withernsea which had stood derelict before being restored in 1858). The fragments were then used for the third time as rather fine folly in Pearson Park.

In 1864 the local historian Sheahan wrote that the Ruins would soon mellow and ‘form a pretty feature’. Publishers agreed and the scene was soon featured on countless picture postcards.

By 1929 the once pristine area around the folly had become overgrown, and a letter to the editor of the Hull Daily Mail suggested that a ‘suitable inscription’ be placed near the Ruins to explain the forgotten history of the stones. But the folly continued to fall out of fashion and favour, and it was cleared when the park was ‘modernised’ in the 1950s to save money on maintenance and staffing. Sadly there was no auction this time, and the Folly Flâneuse has not (yet) discovered what happened to the ancient stones. Pearson Park remains an amenity for the people of Hull.

There’s an excellent history of the Zoological Gardens on the Hull History Centre website here https://www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/whats-on/activities/The-Zoo-on-the-Avenue-Booklet.pdf

Thanks to Chris Hand for mentioning the Ruins and setting in motion a most enjoyable piece of research, and to the teams at Hull History Centre and York Minster Archives.

Please scroll down to the comments box if you would like to share any thoughts or further information. Thank you very much for reading.

Newstead Abbey is best known as the seat of the Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, but it was equally famed in the middle of the 18th century as the home of his great-uncle, William, the 5th Baron, known as the ‘Wicked Lord’. It was William who built sham forts and castles around the estate’s Great Lake, on which sailed his fleet of boats.

William (1722-1798) became notorious when he killed a man in a duel in 1765, and after his death countless stories were told of the Wicked Lord’s licentiousness, his feckless approach to money, and his murderous tendencies – many of the tales were wildly exaggerated, but whatever his vices he had the virtue of knowing how to erect a good gothic folly.

The sham castle on a hill above the lake was built in 1749, the date being inscribed above the door, although no records of a designer seem to survive. The Battery on the shore of the lake below the Castle must have been constructed around the same date, as it is shown in an engraving published in October 1749.

The Castle, as it is named on the earliest Ordnance Survey map of 1838, was built as a belvedere, from whence ‘the views of the lakes, the abbey and its fine arch, the plantation and the park […] form a very noble landscape’. It was also a banqueting house, and in the basement were servants quarters for the preparation of food. The upper storey was an ‘Octagon Gothic Room’ with a coved ceiling. This space was fashionably fitted out with a polychromatic Gothic fire surround, a sofa, blue and gold ‘Chinese’ chairs, and statues including Venus and Flora. No doubt great parties were held there, although little contemporary evidence can be found. But such is the Wicked Lord’s reputation that Emily Brand, in her recent book on the Byron family, surmises that ‘beyond that great oak door William and his dishonourable friends supposedly sank into depravity and staged drink-fuelled orgies’.

Below the Castle was a rampart with gateways at each end on which 4 guns were mounted, and at the foot of the slope was the Battery, ‘a small Fortification with about Twenty Cannon’ and a flagpole with boathouse alongside. Once the Castle and Battery were complete William ordered a number of boats, and in September 1753 a friend of the family noted in her diary that ‘ye ships came today to Newstead’. As well as craft described simply as yachts and boats, there was a rather more impressive gunship equipped with 20 cannon. This vessel fired a gun salute which was returned from the fort and battery. The accounts for 1755 show that a sailor and an assistant were paid to maintain the fleet and crew the ships. It has been assumed, with the arsenal of cannon on the boat and at the forts, that mock naval battles (naumachia) were enacted at Newstead, and whilst that seems likely, no first-hand accounts of such antics have been found.

By 1759 William had already embellished a mill across the lake from the Battery with turrets and battlements. In that same year it was reported that he was planning to add kennels and stables in a similar style. In 1767 a visitor noted that the building was known as ‘Moro Castle’, suggesting that it was complete by 1762, the year the British stormed the Moro Castle in the Siege of Havana during the Seven Years War. But this is the sole mention of it by that name, and it was better known as the Fort.

All of this investment, as well as William’s extravagant lifestyle in general, led to financial difficulties, and he had to sell off wood to pay his debts. In 1760 Horace Walpole wrote to his friend George Montagu to say that Lord Byron had ‘lost large sums, and paid part in old oaks, five thousand pounds worth of which have been cut near the house’.

Walpole may have exaggerated a little for dramatic effect, as other visitors in the 1760s admired the ‘fine park’, and the ‘fine oaks’. The trees in the immediate vicinity of the Castle were certainly reprieved, as in 1768 a visitor admired the ‘large plantation’ each side of the folly. These woods are shown in an engraving of 1780 after a painting by Paul Sandby, above, and in the anonymous watercolour taken from the same viewpoint.

The Castle survived into the 20th century, being used for a time as a schoolroom, but it was demolished in 1921, with only traces now visible above ground.

The Battery (listed grade II* as ‘the Cannon Fort’) and the Fort (grade II) can still be seen: the former was restored a few years ago and can be visited, and the latter, the abbey’s tea-room in the middle of the 20th century, can be admired from across the lake.

Newstead Abbey was bought by the philanthropist Sir Julien Cahn and presented to the City of Nottingham in 1931. The fort and stables were later sold and converted to private housing but the abbey and park have continued as a popular tourist destination ever since. Read more https://newsteadabbey.org.uk

For more on Naumachia see the essay by Michael Cousins (who is thanked for his help with this post) and Patrick Eyres in the New Arcadian Journal https://www.newarcadianpress.co.uk/product/naumachia/

For more on Newstead see the excellent Newstead Abbey: a Nottinghamshire Country House: its Owners and Architectural History 1540-1931, by Rosalys Coope & Pete Smith.    http://www.thorotonsociety.org.uk/publications/recordseries/newsteadabbey.htm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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