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.

In 1950 the Automobile Association (A.A.) published a handbook for drivers which included maps and a gazetteer of the towns and villages of England and Wales (Scotland had its own association). As post-war paper shortages eased, a new expanded edition was published in 1958 which included illustrations of the sites a motorist might expect to see as they travelled sedately along the roads of Britain (as the maps make clear the motorway network was then at a very early stage of development). Alongside the churches, monuments, castles, historic pubs, chalk figures and gibbets there are more than thirty follies for the driver to spot along his way.

By the time the Flâneuse’s 1961 copy of The Illustrated Road Book to England and Wales (a battered family heirloom) was published, more than 450,000 copies had been supplied to A.A. members, along with the distinctive yellow badge to display on the car.

Whilst the atlas and guide contains everything the driver needs to know about motoring, mileages and market days, it doesn’t give any clues as to who compiled the comprehensive gazetteer, which ranges from Abberton to Zennor, so the Flâneuse is unable to give credit.

The illustrators too remain anonymous, although we do know how the images were sourced. For four years A.A. members of staff photographed anything of interest they saw, and these images were handed to the artists. As the introduction explains, using sketches allowed ‘some of the more obtrusive features of modern life’ to be omitted – so the reader wouldn’t be offended by a TV aerial or an ugly modern streetlight.

The author of the introduction struck a melancholy note when they mused that some of the landmarks illustrated might have disappeared by the time a new edition was published. Local improvements, they wrote, ‘seem so frequently to obliterate the picturesque.’

The Flâneuse is pleased to report that of the many follies featured in the guide almost all survive, including the small selection pictured above.

There have only been two major casualties – an eye-catching toll-house in Berkshire (above) and the Westwick Arch in Norfolk, described as ‘formerly the main entrance to the Westwick Estate’.

As this has been a rather monochrome post, here is an example of the A.A.’s very own contribution to landscape ornament – the black and vibrant yellow phone boxes that could once be found across Britain. All are now redundant, and only a handful survive in their original locations, brightening the roadside. This one is in Mere in Cheshire.

As ever, the Flâneuse found herself wandering off subject into the fascinating history of the A.A. As the 1961 edition of the Road Book was published, it was announced that members would soon miss out on the famous salute from a passing A.A. patrolman. In that year the practice was discontinued as dangerous, although pedestrian patrolmen were still permitted to greet members in this way. There’s a great potted history of the A.A. here.

The Flâneuse salutes her readers and wishes them a safe journey if they are travelling this weekend. Your thoughts are always welcome, please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch.

In November 1960, The Queen magazine published a special issue that asked the question ‘What’s so different about the British?’ Amongst the contributors were Norman Parkinson on ‘British Clothes’, Ambrose Heath on the British and cooking and Laurie Lee on the village of Slad. And what could be more British than follies, the subject discussed by Nicholas Guppy, and illustrated in wildly extravagant fashion by cartoonist ffolkes.

Guppy (1925-2012), writer, environmentalist and explorer, thought that ‘follies suit the British temperament’. He elaborated that there is ‘something light-hearted, whimsical and above all disorderly about many of them’ and concluded that they are ‘manifestations of eccentricity, and of rebellion’. Guppy’s article was entitled Follyphilia, the word he coined to describe those with an affectionate regard for such structures.

Some follies, thought Guppy, were built as ripostes to the ‘smug world of columned Palladianism’, (and he pointedly excluded classical garden ornaments from his article). His examples of such ‘crudely-made though often costly buildings’ included St David’s Ruin in Yorkshire, Dunstall Castle in Worcestershire and Arnos Castle near Bristol (pictured top in 1972).

‘…a crumbling edifice on the horizon’, he wrote, ‘inspired awesome thoughts about the vanity of earthly ambition, etc., or at least a fashionably genteel melancholy’.

Follies could provide an imaginary link with ‘a more heroic past’ in the form of a false-fronted cottage, a sham castle or abbey, a tower, or even an entire faux-druidical temple, such as the one near Masham in Yorkshire.

Then there were the towers that just soared higher and higher, often in a bid to outbuild the competition or to announce great wealth and position. Or, in the case of the one at Sway, to test the future of reinforced concrete in building towers.

Dank caves and subterranean passages like Sir Francis Dashwood’s at West Wycombe were too ‘curiously horrid’ for Guppy’s liking, but he did appreciate ‘gay affairs of glittering crystal-spar, of pearly shells and patterned pebbles’ such as the Shell House at Goodwood. Reaffirming his distaste for the Greco-Roman garden ornament he found the grotto at Stourhead ‘too classical’.

But for Guppy the ‘ultimate folly was the hermitage’, combining as it did the ‘picturesque features of a ruin and a grotto, the utmost eccentricity of building materials’ with a human inhabitant. Guppy gives the rustic shelter known as the Sanctuary of Hermit Finch at Burley-on-the-Hill, in Rutland, as his example, but sadly this folly was destroyed by fire in 1962, only a few years after this article was published.

The main image accompanying the article is of a structure that is unlikely to have ever graced a landscape. The cartoonist Michael ffolkes (1925-1988), conjured up a wonderful tower featuring elements of just about every British folly ever built (and a bowler-hatted Brit enjoying the view).

The article is illustrated with small black and white photographs of the follies, and no photographer is credited, so the Flâneuse has chosen to illustrate this post with better quality images of the same follies. All are roughly contemporary with the article, and all are from the Neville and William Hawkes Collection. Neville and William, father and son, were both architects and follyphiliacs, and Neville (1910-1988) took the views shown here at much the same time as Guppy was writing this article.

The Hawkes family donated the photographic archive to the Folly Fellowship, the charity which aims to to protect, preserve, and promote follies, grottoes & garden buildings, and the photographs are reproduced here by kind permission.

Dunstall Castle is in the park at Croome, a National Trust property; the Druid’s Temple on the Swinton estate is freely accessible as is Arnos Castle on the edge of Bristol. The tower at Sway is private, but can be seen from miles around.

If you find the folly illustrated by ffolkes please get in touch.

Thank you for reading. The Flâneuse is always delighted to learn more, or to hear your thoughts, so please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Richard Worsley inherited his father’s baronetcy, and the Appuldurcombe estate on the Isle of Wight, in 1768. The following year set off on the Grand Tour, and on his return in 1770 he turned his attention to remodelling the house and park. In the next few years he erected two eye-catchers to be seen from the mansion: an obelisk and a dramatic hilltop sham ruin called Cook’s Castle.

The origin of the name Cook’s Castle is uncertain, but it is named as such on a 1773 estate plan. In the eighteenth century there was no good road to the folly, and in 1793 Henry Penruddocke Wyndham was frustrated by the effort that was required to reach the ruins. He concluded that the sham castle did not ‘deserve such exertions’, as the building was too ‘regular’, that is it was too neat to be a genuine ruin. His mistake seems to have been to view the folly at close quarters: Sir Richard Worsley (1751-1805) himself described the sham in his History of the Isle of Wight, published in 1781, and makes it clear that the ‘ruin of an ancient castle’ was intended as ‘a point of view from the house’. Maps from the middle of the nineteenth century also show it as a series of three towers connected by a curtain wall, but as an engraving from the same period illustrates, the central tower had by then collapsed.

Visitors who looked to the folly from the mansion were impressed, and even the oft-critical commentator on landscape Revd William Gilpin found much to praise. He described Appuldurcombe House as ‘magnificent’, and thought the grounds equally impressive. Cook’s Castle was, he wrote, ‘well executed and […] well placed’. A traveller in 1798 noted the ‘modern ruin’, and thought it had a ‘better effect from the house than is usual for such buildings to have’.

A century later, with improved roads and the coming of the railway, Cook’s Castle and its ‘picturesque grounds’ had become a favourite picnic spot for excursionists and society outings. Few were fooled by the supposed ancient ruin, and John Gwilliam expressed his feelings in verse in 1845:

There was of course a downside to the popularity of the spot, which was featured in countless guidebooks, and by 1887 there were concerns that the folly was being damaged by vandals. The sham ruin quickly became a genuine one, and by the middle of the twentieth century there was nothing at all to be seen. Only a stone now marks the approximate spot where Cook’s Castle once stood.

Sir Richard also erected a ‘Cornish granite obelisk, near seventy feet high’ to the memory of Sir Robert Worsley 4th bart, who died in 1747 (the fourth baronet died without issue and the Appuldurcombe estate was left to a cousin who was Sir Richard’s grandfather). Built on a ‘bare down’, the obelisk was completed in 1774 and commemorated Sir Robert’s ‘long and exemplary life’, and Sir Richard’s gratitude that he had succeeded to the estate.

The monument was visible from miles around, but this exposed spot made it vulnerable to the elements. Having been repaired after a lightning strike in 1831, it was ‘blown down’ in a gale in December 1836.

The lower stages of the obelisk were restored in 1983, resulting in a stubby little monument, which is no longer a great landmark and eye-catcher…

The only major landscape ornament to survive at Appuldurcombe today is the elegant Freemantle Gate (grade II*), described in c.1779 as a ‘handsome Gateway of the Ionic Order’.

It is not clear who designed the obelisk and folly castle, but the antiquarian Sir Richard is likely to have played a part. A possible candidate is William Donn, who worked for Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown before setting up on his own: he was paid almost £4,000 for work at Appuldurcombe between 1774 and 1782. Donn was crossing to the Isle of Wight in 1777 and chatted to a fellow traveller. The tourist noted in his journal that Donn was working for Sir Richard, and described him as being ’employed in undertaking to build Houses and to lay out Gardens for Gentlemen’ (thanks to the Garden Historian for this brilliant reference).

Capability Brown himself did visit Appuldurcombe in October 1779, and sent a plan for improvements the following summer. Sadly Sir Richard’s accounts of work on the house and park are not known to survive, so many questions about who did what, and when, remain unanswered, but the sham castle and obelisk pre-date Brown’s plan.

Appuldurcombe House (grade I) is in the care of English Heritage and can be visited in the summer season. It was a roofless shell for many years but has been partially restored as a wedding venue. There’s more here.

There is a comments box at the foot of the page and your thoughts are always welcome. Thanks 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 the middle of the 18th century Wallington Hall, west of Morpeth in Northumberland, was the seat of Sir Walter Calverley Blackett. Like many men of his time, he remodelled his park and introduced fashionable landscape features. On Rothley Crags, a windswept outcrop of rock north of Wallington Hall, he erected a sham castle which served as a distant eye-catcher from the house.

‘Rothley Tower’ was built for Sir Walter (1707-1777) in 1746-47 as the centrepiece of the newly-walled Rothley deer park. A central tower was linked by curtain walls to two smaller turrets, all with battlements and gothic detailing. The stonemasons were John Codling and George Brown, whose famed brother Lancelot (aka Capability) gave advice to Sir Walter, although it is sadly little-documented. A plan in the collection at Wallington Hall suggests that a more ambitious scheme, with a spire on the central tower and further turrets, was initially planned but later abandoned. The Duchess of Northumberland, a careful recorder of the country houses she visited, noted in her diaries that the architect was Daniel Garrett (?-1753) , and in 1775 the Duchess had a sketch taken for her collection:

As well as being an eye-catcher from Wallington Hall and a picnic destination, the folly might also have had a defensive purpose. Built immediately after the Jacobite uprising had put the northern counties of England on high alert for invading armies of Scots, the tower was equipped with 6 brass guns in 1748, and was ready to deter the enemy if required.

With the coming of more peaceful times, the Castle (as it is named on a 1777 estate plan) became purely decorative in purpose. A traveller who saw the folly in 1766 was told it was intended to be an ‘object’ in the landscape, a sea-mark and a deer-shelter, the park at that date being ‘full of deer and game’. The natural historian John Wallis wrote in 1769 that the entrance was flanked by two ‘jaw-bones of a Whale’, over seventeen feet tall, and the creature’s vast shoulder blades were also on display.

In a county rich in medieval strongholds Blackett clearly wished people to believe they were looking at a genuine fortification, and the local poet Thomas Oliver suggested as much in ‘On a View of Roadley Castle…’, written before 1777:

Upon its airy summit high,
An antique tower appears,
Who to the stranger passing by,
Seems aged a thousand years.

The historian William Hutchinson was fooled when he visited in 1778. After missing the ‘proper road’ he was forced to climb a fence and clamber up the steep crag only to find that the ‘object of [his] anxious curiosity’ was ‘no other than an ornamental structure’. But he did at least concede that the situation was ‘romantick’. In the central tower were stone tables and chairs of rude form, and the battlements gave a view to the sea and Rothley Lake. Hutchinson also noted the statuary at the folly, which he described as ‘huge heads of griffins’ and ‘two preposterous effigies, representative of no known dress, personage or people’.

The origin of the two stone figures (called Caesar and Pompey in Oliver’s poem) is not known, but two degraded torsos that remain in the gardens today may be remnants of the ‘preposterous effigies’.

The griffins are easier to identify, and came from a London gate that was pulled down in 1761. Bishopsgate was once topped by the ‘city arms supported by dragons’, and these are the 4 ‘griffins’ that once adorned Rothley Castle, but can now be found close to Wallington Hall. The story goes that Sir Walter purchased a quantity of stone from the demolition of Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, and had it brought north by sea as ballast in his colliers that were empty on the return trip to Northumberland.

Eneas Mackenzie produced an updated history of the county in 1825. He acknowledged that Hutchinson had been in ‘peevish humour’ when he wrote so disparagingly of the sham castle, but repeated some of the earlier writer’s description to illustrate how things had by then changed at Rothley: soon after Sir Walter’s death in 1777 his heir removed the deer and put the parkland ‘under cultivation’. The Northumberland historian, Rev. John Hodgson, described the area in 1827 and by then Rothley Castle was ‘neglected’ and Hodgson accused travellers and local youths of vandalising the statues.

This accounts for the removal of the statuary to the grounds of Wallington Hall. The griffin heads were moved to woods on the estate in the nineteenth century, and then in around 1929 to the lawn in front of Wallington Hall, where they can be seen today (their moss-covered wings can be found in another part of the garden). Their sudden appearance as one rounds a corner remains, as Barbara Jones wrote in her research notes, ‘very startling’.

In the 19th century the family continued to visit Rothley Park and the Wallington collection has sketches taken, and botanical specimens collected, on visits to the castle. The park was used for fox hunting, with the two follies making useful landmarks. Rothley had also become a popular destination for walkers and for excursionists on the newly-arrived Wansbeck Railway (axed in the 1950s, but still walkable in parts and known affectionately as the ‘Wannie Line’). Individual picnic parties were politely requested to apply for permission to visit the crags ten days in advance, or tourists could join an organised trip with tea and music:

A little over a century after it was built the origins of the folly had been forgotten. The surveyors working on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey maps were told the romantic tale that it was ‘used to shelter cattle in troublous times’.

Happily the folly, described in 1902 as ‘the product of the questionable taste of the time of the Georges’, survived the vagaries of fashion and was consolidated as a romantic ruin in the first decade of this century. There are walks across fields to the castle, and a platform in the central tower gives wonderful views across the surrounding countryside. Having approached the folly under blue skies the weather changed rapidly, and the Flâneuse decided it was time to retreat before she was blown off the crags.

Wallington Hall and Rothley Castle (grade II*) are both in the care of the National Trust. Check an OS map for the footpaths to Rothley Castle https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/wallington

The Flâneuse first visited Rothley Castle whilst at Girl Guide camp in the area, and an obsession was born. She has revisited many times, often in the august company of experts Harry Beamish and Nick Owen, who are thanked for sharing their knowledge of the Wallington estate.

Your comments and thoughts are always most welcome. The comments box is at the foot of the page if you’d like to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

On the northern edge of Stratford upon Avon is Clopton House, a handsome mansion which once stood in an extensive park. In 1837 Charles Thomas Warde inherited the Clopton estate from his uncle, and his improvements included this attractive castellated prospect tower.

Warde (1813-1865) built the prospect tower as a landmark for the hunt and a belvedere from which to admire the countryside. A painting dated 1838 shows Clopton House as it looked when he inherited, although Warde’s dogs and horses dominate the foreground.

Although we may admire the tower, unfortunately its builder was not so worthy of commendation. Initially a model squire, Warde was appointed High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1846. But by 1860 he was featured in the press for all the wrong reasons. He was accused of ‘immoral conduct’ and castigated for ‘disgraceful squabbles’ which included assaulting his mistress, Miss Hooper, the mother of several of his children. He was accused of selling her clothes and having her imprisoned (as well as an even less savoury event involving ‘improper intercourse’). His wife had, perhaps unsurprisingly, left him some 12 years earlier.

Warde died in 1865 and his heirs sold the Clopton estate in 1873, with the ‘prospect tower’ noted in the sales particulars. In 1891 Clopton House was the seat of the Hodgson family, and ‘The Tower’ had by then been converted to a dwelling and was home to Charles James, a farm labourer. The estate changed hands again in 1930, when the purchaser was the Beecham family. Utica, first wife of Sir Thomas Beecham, made it her home (the couple lived largely separate lives, and were divorced in 1942). The tower remained a home until the middle of the twentieth century, becoming increasingly dilapidated, until in the 1960s Utica Beecham offered it for sale.

In 1969 the Coventry Evening Telegraph reported that were a ‘homeseeker with unusual tastes’ to walk into the estate agents and ask ‘Do you have a detached tower with a turret and battlements, nice and handy for town?’, the answer would be a resounding ‘Yes’.

The agent boasted of a great deal of interest and in January 1970 it was reported that the purchaser was a young London architect who planned to restore the tower as his home. The price was reported as ‘near £2,500’. Planning permission was granted for an extension to house a bedroom and bathroom, but work did not immediately begin, and in 1972 a local councillor asked for reassurance that the decaying fabric of the main fabric be dealt with ‘very soon’.

By 1974 the architect had concluded that for ‘personal reasons’ he was unable to move to Stratford upon Avon, and the tower was put up for sale at £13,000. Despite the agents again reporting a ‘tremendous amount of interest’, the tower was still on the market in 1975 for £9,500 and in 1976 for £8,750.

Eventually a sale was agreed, and the new owners extended the property. The tower changed hands again in 1984, when it was offered for sale by auction. The house was on the market again recently, when it was noted that the original footprint had ‘increased threefold’. Visiting in late June the Flâneuse found renovations underway.

The tower is listed at grade II. It remains a private house, but can be seen from public roads and footpaths. Clopton House has now been converted into apartments.

The obelisk seen across the fields from the tower was not on the Clopton estate but was a feature of the grounds of the adjacent Welcombe Manor (now a hotel). It was erected in 1876 by Robert Needham Philips to honour his brother Mark Philips.

There’s lots of information on the area here https://www.thewelcombehills.co.uk

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Hume Castle stands on a prominent site, visible for miles round. Initially, this gave it great defensive strengths, but by the later 18th century the ‘considerable eminence’ was thought the perfect site for an eye-catcher. The ruins of the ancient fortification were pulled down and the stone reused to create a curiously crenellated sham castle.

The original castle is said to have been destroyed after it fell to Cromwell’s troops in 1651. It remained a scant ruin until Hugh Hume-Campbell, 3rd Earl of Marchmont (1708-1794), ‘restored and rebattlemented’ it in the later 18th century. An exact date seems elusive, but it was complete by 1789 when this sketch was executed.

The new and very dramatic tower stood bold on the skyline, and could be seen from Marchmont, the new Palladian house the earl began in 1750 a few miles away.

18th century accounts of the new Hume Castle seem hard to find, but later visitors could be quite scathing. In 1908 Alexander Curle, the secretary of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, wrote in his ‘private journal of a Wandering Antiquary’ that Hume Castle was a ‘ridiculous fantastic erection, a modern ruin raised on the site of the ancient fortress’.

A few years later A.G. Bradley described the castle in his The Gateway of Scotland. He thought the ‘terrible mock battlements’ were not even up to the standards of ‘the comic opera stage’.  Clearly the Earl of Marchmont rebuilt the castle with the view from Marchmont House in mind, and a journalist in 1927 best summed up the situation when he quoted the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s line that ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’. There is no denying that at close quarters the giant crenellations are distinctly odd.

In 1970 The Scotsman ran a story by William Chisholm headlined ‘Future of freak castle in the balance’. The Earl of Marchmont’s descendants had sold the castle (as part of the Humehall estate) to the tenant in 1914, and in 1929 it had passed into the ownership of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. By 1970 this body was keen to dispose of the castle but both the National Trust for Scotland and the Ministry of Public Buildings declined to take it on.

There was an impasse for more than twenty years, but we can follow the story via Chisholm’s regular updates in the newspaper. In 1981 there was still ‘extreme difficulty’ in disposing of the building, and in 1984 it was announced that the castle was crumbling and in urgent need of restorations.

The hero of the hour was the Berwickshire Civic Society, under the chairmanship of Major-General Sir John Swinton. The society took a lease on the castle and raised £150,000 to stabilise the walls, install a door and replace railings. The project was managed by architect David Mylne from 1985 until completion in 1992. Chisholm could then write in The Scotsman that the future of Hume Castle was at last secure. It is now in the care of the Hume Castle Preservation Trust and the public are welcome to visit.

Marchmont House passed out of Hume family ownership early in the 20th century and became separated from its lands. The estate was reunited by the Burge family in the later years of that century, and a hugely impressive restoration project has seen the house restored and filled with a collection spanning more than five centuries.

Hume Castle is no longer an eye-catcher from Marchmont as mature plantations block the view, but the Flâneuse was reliably informed that it can be seen from the roof.

Marchmont House can be visited on open days and you can read more here https://www.marchmonthouse.com

For more on the castle see https://humecastle.org/

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In 1908 T.W. Wilkinson submitted an article on ‘Remarkable Follies’ to Wide World Magazine. This popular publication was launched in 1898 and was aimed at men, and in particular what one writer has called ‘armchair adventurers’. It specialised in true-life tales of derring-do with titles such as ‘The Underground Pirates’ and ‘Across Africa by Boat’. One wonders what the readership made of Wilkinson’s article: exciting as follies are, they don’t quite have the drama of ‘A Subterranean Duel’.

Perhaps it was to compete with such adventures that Wilkinson launched into a dramatic introduction:

‘There is no stranger human foible than that which finds vent in the erection of what are popularly known as “follies”. It impels men to begin building without counting the cost, and to create freakish and unnecessary structures, with a consequent enormous waste of money; and its results are seen all over the countryside in half-finished undertakings, architectural atrocities, sham antiquities, and other more or less ridiculous objects. Incredible though it may seem, it is none the less a fact that millions – literally millions – of pounds have been spent on such superfluities’.

After that controversial conspectus Wilkinson goes on to discuss, very briefly, around 20 follies – all fairly well-known examples, with some accompanying photographs. Despite his introduction he isn’t particularly disparaging in most cases, and he even concedes that Ralph Allen’s sham castle on the Bath skyline is ‘picturesque’. A curiosity of his paper is that he uses the word “freaks” as a synonym for “follies”, and to stress this both words almost always appear in inverted commas. Thus the Egyptian Well at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire is a “freak” which ‘appears as if it has just strayed from the British Museum’ (Wilkinson seems oblivious to the fact that this was the builder’s intention).

And Beckford’s Tower on the edge of Bath is noted as ‘one of the most elaborate towers of the freak variety’.

As well as isolated “freaks” such as the foregoing (as Wilkinson wrote) there were also examples of groups of follies built by one man ‘in whom the passion for erecting such things developed into a monomania’. Wilkinson picked out the Brightling “follies” of Mad Jack Fuller and the scattered “follies” of J.S.W.S Erle-Drax on his Dorset estates.

As well as Drax’s elegant tower at Charborough there were, according to Wilkinson, two or three sham antiquities, a huge mausoleum, and other “freaks”. The mausoleum stood in the churchyard at Holnest and was indeed huge – Wilkinson would no doubt have approved when it was pulled down in 1935.

The Charborough Tower still stands and is claimed as inspiration for Thomas Hardy when he was writing Two on a Tower.

Wilkinson ended with the question ‘Is “folly” building dying out now?’. His conclusion was that it didn’t look like it. But he picks the most unlikely structure to argue his case – a factory chimney in Bingley in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire. Whilst a very functional feature of the Roundhill Tannery, the chimney must have qualified as folly in Wilkinson’s eyes as it was unlike any other chimney, and would have been much more expensive than a conventional design. According to another contemporary account of the chimney, each brick was placed 3.16 of an inch out of place so that when it reached a height of 50 feet each face would be opposite the compass point where it had started. Sadly the chimney was pulled down in the early 1970s.

In conclusion Wilkinson makes the bizarre and unqualified statement that “folly” houses are ‘actually now under construction in various parts of the country’. The Flâneuse would love to know which structures he had in mind.

Thanks to Sheila Donaldson of Bingley and District Local History Society for telling me the history of the chimney.

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