Although vandals in earlier centuries may not have been armed with marker pens and aerosol sprays, they were still keen to leave their mark. Follies and garden buildings, often in remote locations, seem to have been particularly attractive targets. Many seemed to think this activity was perfectly acceptable and used their pencil or pocket knife to leave their full name, clearly identifying themselves as the culprits. Owners tried various tactics to deter the scribblers.

Some erected polite notices, requesting that visitors refrained from defacing their garden and landscape features. As early as 1751, the tower known as Hartshead Pike in Lancashire carried a stone plaque poetically requesting that visitors refrain from lobbing stones at the structure:

An account of Hagley in Worcestershire noted graffiti on the alcove seat (by the time the description was published in 1762 the alcove was being converted into the Palladian Bridge which stands today). The writer thought it a pity that ‘that neither gratitude or Good-Manners can prevail with some People; for here and elsewhere, notwithstanding his Lordship’s Request to the contrary, are many Scribblings on the Wall, which give offence to Decency’ (thanks to the Garden Historian for sharing this great snippet).

In 1825 the 4th Duke of Newcastle was ‘much annoyed’ to discover that shells had been broken from the walls of the new grotto he was building at Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, and a few years later he was ‘much shocked’ to find insulting graffiti in his Stone Temple by the side of the lake.

At Stanway House, in Gloucestershire, visitors seem to have been a relatively well-behaved bunch and a simple painted sign in the Pyramid of 1750 (title image) seems to have deterred the worst of the offenders.

At the shelter built for those walking across the moorland called Hampsfell in Lancashire (now Cumbria) a sign implored that visitors ‘do no mischief’.

When this didn’t work, the owner put up some blank boards and asked people to sign their names there. But ‘wanton mischief’ continued:

At Swanage in Dorset, that great collector of architectural salvage, George Burt, got fed up of what one writer in 1922 called ‘the passion of Dick, Tom and Harry […] for inscribing their names upon every prominent object’. He provided two blank stone tablets engraved with the message ‘Persons anxious to write their names will please do so on this stone only’. Dick, Tom and Harry might have been disappointed to learn that they were not leaving their mark in perpetuity, for Burt apparently had the stones scrubbed and whitewashed over at regular intervals ready for the next set of tourists.

The owners of a pretty rustic summerhouse near Braemar in the Highlands, pinned-up a polite request, again in verse form, asking visitors to refrain from leaving graffiti:

But when the Flâneuse visited a few years ago one family had not only ignored the sign, but had been making annual trips to update their crude biro scrawls, recording their wedding and the birth of grandchildren. The Flâneuse would like to have named and shamed, but fears that that the family in question would enjoy the attention.

Thank you for reading. Your polite scribblings are most welcome – you can find the comments box at the foot of the page to share any thoughts.

When Archibald Hogg of Bandrum House built this tower as an observatory and summerhouse in the 1840s, Saline had the ‘well-merited reputation of being the Paradise of Fife’. The village, built along the valley of the Saline Burn, is surrounded by hills and from the eminence called Bandrum this tower enjoyed a prospect of the undulating landscape to the Firth of Forth and beyond.

The story told locally is that the tower, known as the Temple, replaced a wooden structure, which had been erected by the previous owner in around 1805. Construction of the stone tower began in 1845 under the supervision of Lewis Mercer who worked alongside his brothers. Stone stairs lead up to an upper floor, now collapsed, with a fireplace and windows giving an amazing view to Bandrum House and the surrounding countryside.

Lewis Mercer (c.1809-1867) was an architect and mason who lived in Saline and designed and built a number of buildings there. A simple stone marks his burial place in the village churchyard, but the most curious monument to him is his head, carved in stone, which sits outside a house on Main Street in the village.

A poem, published in a local paper in 1888, tells that the from the tower there was a view to Stirling and across the Forth to Edinburgh. The Pentland and Ochil hills, could be seen, as well as the mountains of Ben Ledi and Ben Lomond. The writer recalled his childhood visits to the tower:

‘Twas here I used to sit and gaze upon
The glimmering landscape, as the setting sun
Went down behind Ben Lomond’s lofty peak,
And tinged the hilltops with a golden streak.

The tower (listed as Category C) is now a roofless shell but remains a popular landmark, and rewards the hike up from the edge of the village.

Follow the footpath opposite the entrance to Midfield Terrace in Saline (the path is overgrown and is best left until winter when the nettles and thistles are less ferocious – the Flâneuse speaks from recent experience). Or you could take a leisurely drive into Saline on the B913 and admire the distant tower on its hillside as you approach the hamlet of Cowstrandburn. From this road you will also be able to appreciate the tower’s relationship to Hogg’s seat at Bandrum House, now a nursing home.

Saline was once home to another curiosity – a group of stone figures carved in the 1820s by sculptor George Forrest. Depicted are Tam o’ Shanter and Souter Johnny, characters created by Robbie Burns, and Symon and Bauldy from the poem The Gentle Shepherd by Allan Ramsay. From 1832 Forrest exhibited his sculptures on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, where they were described as ‘one of the most popular and attractive exhibitions in the Scottish metropolis’. The collection was gradually dispersed after his death in 1852, and these four figures found a home in the grounds of Kirklands House in Saline. They were sold to Fife Museums Service in 2010. Whilst Symon and Bauldy await conservation, the restored statues of Tam and Johnny can now be seen outside Dunfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries.

Thank you for reading. Further information is always welcome so please scroll down to the comments box to share your thoughts.

Blagdon Hall stands close to the former Great North Road, a few miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. At the end of the lake stands a circle of Doric columns known as The Temple. The columns were first erected as part of a rotunda ,with an unusual domed roof, at Heaton Hall, on the edge of Newcastle. Part of the grounds of Heaton Hall later became a public park, but when it looked as if the Temple was going to be a drain on corporation funds, it was removed to Blagdon in around 1937.

Matthew Ridley (1711-1778) of Heaton Hall was a successful businessman and represented Newcastle as mayor and as Member of Parliament. He succeeded his father to Heaton Hall in 1739, by which date the ‘beautiful house’ already stood amongst avenues, gardens and a wilderness. Ridley added a new stone front to the existing brick mansion, with towers at the corners and by 1766 Heaton Hall was noted by Sir Roger Newdigate as a ‘well looking house with round Towers at each End sashd & modern’ (confirming that the house was remodelled by Matthew Ridley, and not by his son Sir Matthew White Ridley in the 1770s as has previously been stated). An account in 1787 confirms that the architect of the new front was William Newton of Newcastle.

Ridley must also have been laying out his grounds in the then fashionable natural style: the park was described in 1769 as planted with ‘small clumps of young forest-trees’ (there is a tantalising mention of the landscape designer Richard Woods leaving Harewood in Yorkshire to visit ‘Mr Ridley’ in Northumberland in 1765). The watercolour below shows that there was a vista through a plantation to the Temple as a distant eye-catcher when approaching the estate.

The Temple probably also dates from this period of improvements. It is described as a ‘tempiato’ in Wallis’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland… of 1769, and in the 1770s William Beilby painted it for the Duchess of Northumberland’s album of views. It may also be the work of William Newton, although no evidence is known to survive.

Sadly no trace survives of some ‘mock ruins’ built by Ridley ‘as ornamental objects from Heaton Hall’. This folly, also extant by 1769, stood on an eminence at nearby Byker and as well as being an object from Heaton Hall, it gave a ‘most extensive prospect’ of the town of Newcastle and the shipping on the Tyne.

The Ridleys left Heaton in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the estate became home to the Potter family. In 1878 Addison Potter sold part of the pleasure grounds to the Corporation of Newcastle for use as a public park – this portion included the ‘ornamental temple-like building’, which was one of the first things to be seen when entering the new park via the South Gate. The Gardeners’ Chronicle magazine liked how the corporation had conserved the pleasure garden ‘very much as it was as a residential place’. Picture postcards show the Temple at the top of a slope, with steps rising through a rockery, although it is not clear if this was created by the Potter family or if it is a later landscaping by the Parks department.

In 1932 the Potters sold Heaton Hall, and the remainder of its ground, to a firm of builders. Under the headline ‘The End of Heaton Hall’ the local paper announced that the hall would be razed and the land developed for housing.

Meanwhile, the Temple in the park was not being kept in good repair and in December 1936 a corporation working group discussed its future. The councillors were divided, with some wishing to see its immediate demolition and others keen that it should be repaired. By that date Viscount Ridley of Blagdon (the viscountcy was created in 1900) had already been consulted, and had agreed to take the columns if the Temple was to be pulled down. The vote was won 4:3 in favour of keeping the Temple, but by autumn 1937 no action had been taken and it was roped off from the public and declared unsafe. Contractors were called in to give estimates for taking the structure down and re-erecting it at Blagdon – a deal must have been struck and the columns were moved the few miles to Blagdon. History does not seem to record what happened to the domed roof, but the columns form a charming eye-catcher at the head of the lake.

Blagdon Hall is a private home but the gardens open for charity on a few days each year. You can find forthcoming dates here.

Heaton Park, with adjoining parks along the valley of the Ouse Burn, is a Grade II registered public park and is freely accessible.

The Flâneuse is grateful to Dr Michael Cousins for sharing his transcript of the travel diary of Sir Roger Newdigate. Thanks also to Fiona Green for sharing her research into Heaton Park and to Richard Pears for information on Blagdon Hall.

Thank you for reading. As ever your thoughts or observations are very welcome. The comments box can be found at the foot of the page.

Painshill, or Pains Hill, near Cobham in Surrey, was the creation of the Hon. Charles Hamilton. From 1738 he landscaped the valley of the river Mole and decorated his estate with an enchanting array of garden buildings, including this pavilion which is known as the Gothic Temple. In 1953 Barbara Jones wrote that she feared the park was ‘beyond help’, but thanks to an amazing restoration project, which began in the 1980s and continues today, it has been returned to its former beauty and elegance.

The open temple, probably one of the first ornamental buildings to be erected in Hamilton’s park (the earliest reference found to date is 1761), was constructed of wood treated to look like stone. As well as being an eye-catcher from the walks and rides in the park, its location was carefully chosen so that visitors would be led to the building from which they could admire a panorama which featured a Turkish tent, a gothic tower, a bridge, a hermitage and a classical temple. On a circuit of the pleasure grounds the visitor would also encounter a ruined Roman arch and a grotto decorated with sparkling minerals.

Barbara Jones described Painshill in Follies & Grottoes, published in 1953. Her first thought was that Hamilton (1704-1786) was a visionary. She imagined him looking at the ‘naturally pretty’ valley and having the courage to turn it into ‘raw earth, puddles, planks and little naked trees’, knowing that ultimately it was ‘going to be alright’. Whilst Jones mused on the origins of the park, Rose Macaulay, whose Pleasure of Ruins was published in the same year, delighted in the decay, describing the neglected park as a ‘delicious wilderness of follies’.

A photograph of 1937, taken by Herbert Felton for the Architectural Review, shows the temple in reasonable condition. The art historian Osvald Sirén (1879-1966) explored Painshill in the late 1940s, and in his China and the Gardens of Europe, published in 1950, he described the Gothic Temple as being in a ‘better state of preservation’ than many of the other garden features (Sirén was spotted photographing the ruined buildings by a young John Harris (1931-2022). Happily for history, the nascent country-house snooper had ignored the ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ signs.)

Whilst some of the garden buildings were lost because of neglect, others had fallen victim to deliberate destruction: the hermitage was apparently chopped up for firewood in the 1940s. Harris saw the Temple of Bacchus as a crumbling wreck in the 1940s, and it had disappeared when he returned in 1954. When a visitor in around 1960 enquired after the temple he was told that it had ‘got a bit dicey so they took a tractor to it’.

By the 1970s the temple was rapidly falling into dereliction, and in February 1977 Elmbridge District Council served a repairs notice on the owner of the park and sent in a team to support the temple within a scaffolding shell. Two months later came big news when the council confirmed that, after some years of negotiation, they were to purchase 47 acres of the ‘much neglected Painshill Park’.

Heritage societies, including the Georgian Group, the Garden History Society and the Council for the Protection of Rural England had already been working behind the scenes to gather information, and in 1973 the historian Alison Hodges had published the first comprehensive history of the garden in Garden History, the journal of the Garden History Society. The Friends of Painshill was founded in 1975, with support from landscape architects, antiquarians, journalists, M.P.s and local residents.

It took until 1980 for the council to acquire a further 106 acres of the park. In 1981 the Friends issued their second newsletter, in which it was announced that ‘Elmbridge Borough Council have now appointed Mrs. J. Burford as the first full time administrator of the park’. One of the earliest structures to be restored was the Gothic Temple (grade II*), with work complete in 1985.

The Painshill Park Trust was founded in 1981 and work began to raise the required funds. One of the principal sources was the National Heritage Memorial Fund, created in 1980, which by 1988 had pledged £1.4 million ‘towards a management plan and towards continuing restoration work’. In 1988-89 the British Museum hosted Treasures for the Nation: Celebrating National Heritage, an exhibition showing the public how the fund was using taxpayers money to save the UK’s most important heritage treasures. Painshill was featured as an example of a garden rescued with the help of NHMF funds, and the text noted the garden as a rare example of one which ‘did not suffer violent change, but was simply abandoned to the hand of time’.

It is impossible to summarise here the vast amount of research, fundraising and building work that took place in the subsequent years (the restored and dazzling grotto alone is a magnificent achievement, and the Temple of Bacchus, toppled by tractor, has been reconstructed), so visit the website to learn more, or better still visit the park itself.

There are some who, whilst full of admiration for the restoration, have a nostalgia for the ‘mystical and wonderful’ ruinous park that they explored as a child, when it was in that condition which the artist John Piper called ‘decrepit glory’. As Henry Parr, who sent the Flâneuse the pre-restoration photographs shown here, wrote: ‘in its ruinous state, Painshill park was beautiful but mysterious, pretty but sinister, lovely but rather unnerving’.

The thrill of pushing through overgrown shrubs and stumbling across an abandoned temple might be gone but, thanks to the amazing restoration project, one once more sees Painshill as Charles Hamilton envisioned it.

There’s lots more on Painshill here. Thanks to historian Cherrill Sands for being an excellent cicerone.

Thank you for reading. As ever, the Flâneuse would be delighted to hear from readers with any thoughts or comments. Scroll down to get in touch.

In 1761, Henry Blundell was given control of the Ince Blundell estate by his father. He had recently married Elizabeth Mostyn and the couple settled into the mansion house, which had been built earlier in the century. Blundell was an avid collector, with the funds to indulge his passion, and after his wife’s early death he spent time in Italy before returning to Ince Blundell to build two temples ‘purposely for the reception of statuary’.

Blundell (1724-1810) had become very wealthy thanks to family bequests and Ince Blundell was home to an impressive collection of Old Master and modern paintings. What was lacking was a fine collection of Roman statuary, so in 1776 he set off for Italy to join his friend, fellow collector and fellow Catholic, Charles Townley. With advice from Townley, and a network of contacts, he went on something of a shopping spree. Blundell returned to Italy in subsequent years, and also continued to buy works privately and at auction in Britain, quickly running out of space to display the works.

Blundell’s solution was to display sculpture in a complex of garden buildings fronted by a classical pedimented temple. This was connected to a greenhouse and an octagonal room, all of which were filled with sculpture as well as plants (the tithe map of 1843 shows this substantial range of buildings). The temple carries a Greek inscription, shown in the engraving above, which is usually translated as ‘here spring is eternal and it is summer in months not its own’ – i.e. the heated glasshouses allowed plants to flourish in all seasons (this inscription also appears on the orangery in Clapham).

The temple is attributed to the Liverpool architect William Everard (1723-1792) on the evidence that a portrait of the architect showed him with ‘the plan in his hand’, pointing to the completed structure (the portrait was shown at a lecture in Liverpool in 1869, but its current whereabouts are unknown). The temple was extant by February 1790 when it is shown in a drawing (see below). In that same year the Polish princess Isabel Czartoryska visited – she was not impressed by the combination of sculpture and verdure. She complained that Ince was a ‘storehouse of various objects gathered without taste or choice. Plenty of ugly statues and many sarcophagi, so called antique, positioned among the geraniums in the hot houses’.

Blundell soon needed still more space, and in 1801 he discussed the creation a new gallery with Townley. He commissioned a wooden model (sadly lost) of the planned ‘room’, which took the form of a rotunda modelled on the pantheon in Rome.

Like the original, the building was top-lit although, this being Lancashire, it was glazed. When complete it was used to house his ‘choicest specimens’ and one visitor recorded how his ‘eye roved in admiration from figure to figure’. Blundell had boasted that many of the buildings on his estate were to his own design, and he may have designed this building himself, using an executant architect/mason named briefly in the surviving accounts as Hope.

Blundell carefully catalogued his collection and in 1803 he published a handlist of the works in the house and both temples, followed in 1809 by a lavish two-volume illustrated work.

Originally the pantheon was freestanding, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it was connected to the house via a single storey link.

Whilst Blundell understandably favoured classical buildings in which to display the sculpture collection, there was a gothic ornament in his park. Sometime before 1786 a prospect tower was erected east of the house (it is shown on Yates’s map of the County Palatine of Lancaster published in that year). Described in 1823 as the ‘observatory’, it was said to ‘command a very extensive view’.

Named on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps as ‘Blundell Tower’, it disappeared early in the next century and is known only from two artworks. The drawing above, formerly at Stonor Park (once home to Blundell’s son-in-law), is a great record of the lost tower. National Museums Liverpool was able to purchase this view for the city’s collection at Christies in 1992. The tower also appears in a painting by Charles Towne of Blundell’s horse, Duchess (private collection).

James Lees-Milne, Historic Buildings Secretary of the National Trust, visited Ince, a ‘romantic Papist establishment’ in August 1947. By that date the house had descended to the Weld family, who had added the name Blundell.  Lees-Milne found the Pantheon ‘marvellous’, and thought the displays at Ince Blundell must be the ‘finest statuary collections left in private hands’. That ownership was not to last: in 1959 the family presented many of the sculptures to the city of Liverpool, and a year later the house was sold to the Augustinian Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, to be used as a care home.

Although the art world was relieved that the works were to be preserved as a single collection, there was sadness that it could not remain, as Geoffrey Grigson wrote, in ‘the delightful setting which Henry Blundell devised for it’. A group of ‘distinguished members of the Georgian Group’ wrote to the Times expressing their dismay that the collection was to be removed. Writing in response, Vere E. Cotton, former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, explained that the Liverpool Corporation had only decided on removing the collection with ‘extreme reluctance’. The corporation had explored constructing a new access to the Pantheon, taking a long lease on the temple and even taking down the Pantheon and rebuilding it in a Liverpool park. But none of the options was feasible.

Only a fraction of the sculpture collection can be seen in Liverpool today, with the majority of the works inaccessible in store. The Walker Art Gallery has a selection of the eighteenth century copies from Ince Blundell on display, but the city’s World Museum has no works on show,

But there is some very good news. Ince Blundell recently became a respite centre where unpaid carers can take a break and relax. As well as ensuring a future for the house, and providing a wonderful resource for the local area, this new use means that public access is possible, and pre-booked guided tours are available (and highly recommended).

The tour includes the Pantheon, which is now bare of sculpture, although some of the niches still display the catalogue number assigned by Blundell. The interior is in reasonable condition, but sadly the reliefs mounted on the exterior are badly degraded.

The Garden Temple can also be seen, but the attached greenhouse is long gone (ruins of the furthest room can be seen, although this was later remodelled as part of a range of glasshouses). The temple was restored in the late 1990s, but damp is an ongoing problem. Some wall-mounted works can still be admired, but the free-standing statuary has been removed.

The vast sculpture collection is listed in Blundell’s own publications, and more recently it has been discussed in depth in the volumes of The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture, published from 1991.

House, Pantheon and Temple are listed at grade II*. The park is grade II* registered. Ince Blundell is north of Liverpool and, although originally in Lancashire, it became part of the new county of Merseyside in 1974. You can find Ince Blundell visitor information here. 

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts or information please scroll down to the comments box.

In the 1970s the Coutts Bank building in central London was partly remodelled to a design by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd. A new glass entrance was designed to replace the columned central section of the facade on the Strand. As work progressed Gibberd salvaged some of the redundant masonry to reuse at his Essex home. There he indulged in what the Architects’ Journal called ‘that virtuous activity’ of building follies.

Sir Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) was the Master Planner of the new town created at Harlow, in Essex, from 1946. Needing to be close to the works, he bought a small cottage on Marsh Lane. He remodelled the house and developed the extensive garden, which had plenty of space for the sculpture and architectural salvage Gibberd collected with his second wife, Patricia (they married in 1972).

Gibberd decided to use some of the redundant masonry  from Coutts to create a ‘Roman’ Temple in the garden. His colleagues on site were apparently disgruntled by this decision, as removing the columns Gibberd had chosen was time consuming work – they would have preferred to smash the whole lot to bits.

The masonry was delivered the following year, and as Gibberd wrote ‘a huge lorry equipped with a crane drove down my lane, demolished three trees and dumped a pile of huge fragments in a ditch opposite my entrance gates’. The stone was dragged to the prepared site on a sledge with steel runners.

Three men with a crane and a digger were recruited to construct the folly. Two Portland stone columns and a section of frieze were to be erected in the form of a temple inspired by ancient Roman models. Steel rods were inserted in the columns to give support and one of the men sat in the bucket of the digger to guide the stones into place. The crane driver was asked to drop a third column, so that it would appear to have fallen and broken. The bewildered man exclaimed ‘They’ve come all the way from London and I’m to drop one of them?’, and apparently demanded the instruction in writing so that he couldn’t be held responsible for the damage.

It was, Gibberd concluded, a ‘very expensive folly’, but it brought him great pleasure. When passers-by paused at the gate and asked what the structure was, Gibberd enjoyed telling them it was a fragment from an ancient Roman temple discovered during the development of a nearby industrial estate.

Four urns from the Trafalgar Square facade of the bank, which Gibberd believed to be made of Coade Stone, were mounted on a plinth and placed at an angle to the temple to create a pleasing ensemble.

Although Gibberd claimed to have no masterplan for his garden, he did draw an exquisite plan and elevation of the temple and its garden setting. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1981 as ‘Roman’ Temple (Gibberd was elected RA in 1969).

The Architects’ Journal thought the whole of the bank’s facade should have been retained, or at least reused at another building, but as their reporter concluded, at least Gibberd had ‘tried to atone and Freddie’s folly promises to become a well-loved landmark in Freddie’s own New Town’.

Gibberd died in 1984 and left his house and garden to Harlow for the benefit of the people of the town, although initially it remained home to his widow and there were only occasional open days. Complications over his will left the garden vulnerable (a long story), but there was strong local support and in 1995 the Gibberd Garden Trust was formed to maintain the site and welcome visitors. Lady Gibberd remained closely involved until her death in 2006.

Gibberd said that the half a mile approached road gave his garden ‘a quality of remoteness’. Modern housing now stands close to the track, but is still an adventure to drive down the long lane, wondering if you have perhaps taken a wrong turn, only to suddenly spot the eagle-topped gateposts.

Gibberd’s comments on making the garden are from his lecture notes On Making Gardens and Landscapes which are in the Gibberd archive at the Garden Museum.  Sir Frederick and Lady Gibberd were early supporters of the museum where you can see a small display celebrating Gibberd’s work. The account of the bemused lorry driver is from oral histories collected by Annalise Taylor and published to mark 25 years of the Gibberd Garden Trust.

The Gibberd Garden reopens for the 2026 season on Wednesday 1 April. There’s more here.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts please scroll down to the comments box. You can find it at the bottom of the page.

In the 1980s follies played a part in promoting a new breakfast cereal: special packs of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain contained picture cards featuring ‘Gardens to Visit’. The twenty cards were illustrated with views of gardens in Britain and Ireland, all of them open to the public, and five follies or quirky garden ornaments were among the cards to be collected. As the blurb on the box announced ‘Most of us are enchanted by the magic of a beautiful garden’.

Nutri-Grain was launched in 1987 and, as well as publishing the collectable cards, the marketing team promoted it via recipe leaflets: a ‘cosy supper dish’ of trout stuffed with Nutri-Grain was one suggestion. But the Flâneuse digresses…

Once you had the full set of cards you could send off for a folder in which to display your collection…

The album had an introduction by Clay Jones, then chairman of Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time and co-presenter of Gardeners’ World on BBC2. He wrote that ‘no matter where you live in Britain, there is sure to be a magnificent garden not far away’ (although the cards didn’t actually reflect this – only one was in Scotland, one in Wales and two in Ireland and the majority were in southern England). Acclaimed writer and photographer Heather Angel provided most of the photographs, including all of those featured here, and wrote that she hoped ‘this series will stimulate a greater interest in our gardens’.

The cards are small, only 58cm x 75cm, and the print quality is not the finest, but the Flâneuse would still have been very happy to discover these wonderful photographs in her cereal box…

Card three featured the Pagoda Fountain at Alton Towers in Staffordshire. The autumnal view was accompanied by text describing the ‘magical sight and sound’ of the water falling onto the tiered copper roofs and cascading down causing the copper bells to tinkle.

Number five in the series showed the Gothic Temple at Painshill in Surrey, which had been returned to its former elegance after a major restoration only a couple of years earlier. The card explained that work continued to bring Painshill back to life, and that the park deserved to be better known. Work has continued at Painshill since 1987, and the magnificent grotto, described on the card as damaged during the Second World War, once again sparkles and surprises.

Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal in North Yorkshire was the focus of card eight, and in particular the Temple of Piety complete with its much-photographed reflection in the Moon Pond. The card encouraged collectors to visit and find the ‘spectacular’ surprise view of the ruins of Fountains Abbey.

Card seventeen in the set had a view of the Chinese House and Bridge at Shugborough, in Staffordshire. The card praised the ‘Chinese shrubs’ planted to complement the garden building, and recommended seeing the other ‘notable monuments’ in the park.

The only Irish garden was Mount Stewart in County Down in Northern Ireland. The card didn’t feature the famous Temple of the Winds, but instead showed the Dodo Terrace, where quirky concrete sculptures were placed in the early twentieth century.

All of the gardens remain open to the public, although if visiting the follies at Alton Towers you might be distracted by a different kind of folly – the screams of those riding the Toxicator (‘take hold and brace yourself’) or Nemesis Reborn (‘more uncontrollable than ever before’).

Thanks to Cherrill S for introducing the Flâneuse to the cards, and thanks to you for reading. As ever your thoughts and comments are welcome via the box at the foot of the page.

As with all good serials, there will be a wait until the next episode, but the Flâneuse will be back with a snap, a crackle and a pop in 2026. Until then, wishing everyone happiness whatever your plans for the festive season. Goodbye for now, or should that be Cheerios? (Apologies, but it is the season of the corny Christmas cracker joke).

In the 1740s William Kent designed a new garden ornament for Thomas Coke of Holkham. An artificial hillock was constructed on which the temple was to stand, giving it the name the Seat on the Mount. The temple was later pulled down, but fragments of the four busts which once decorated it were salvaged, and incorporated into a cottage in a nearby village. The Flâneuse has written about follies built from the remnants of houses, but a cottage decorated with the remnants of a garden temple is something new.

The ‘New Mount’ at Holkham was constructed in 1742, and the Seat on the Mount the following year. The sculptor Peter Scheemakers provided the four figures, two female and two male, that decorate the front elevation. Coke (1697-1759), created Baron Lovell in 1728 and 1st Earl of Leicester in 1744, could visit the seat and from its elevated site he is said to have watched as his new house was constructed.

The architect Matthew Brettingham Senior, who had overseen building work at Holkham, produced a volume of views which included an engraving of the Seat on the Mount. His text tells us that the temple was home to a ‘small antique figure of the Nile’ and a ‘Coro Marino’ (Sea Chorus) of sea nymphs, centaurs and cupids in alto relievo. The figure of the Nile was added to the earl’s collection in 1752, and the bas-relief panel of sea creatures was bought by Coke in Rome in 1716, and was originally part of a sarcophagus. It was noticed by a visitor in 1767 who saw the summerhouse with an ‘ancient Bass-relief in the wall’.

It would seem likely that the Seat on the Mount was taken down when parts of the garden were remodelled in the late eighteenth century. The figure of the Nile had been moved into the house by 1817, and the summerhouse does not appear on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps. The art historian Adolf Michaelis complicates matters by mentioning the ‘Seat on the Mount’ in his Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, which was published in 1882. Perhaps he was using outdated information? What is certain is that by 1907 the heads from the Seat on the Mount had been used to embellish a simple cottage in nearby Burnham Overy Town (actually a village, but thus named to distinguish it from Burnham Overy Staithe).

How the figures came to be moved to Burnham Overy Town to decorate the little cottage remains another puzzle, and many passers-by must have wondered about the history of the carved heads.

One such curious tourist was the late follyphiliac Jeffrey Whitelaw, and in 1960 he wrote to Country Life magazine asking if anyone knew the origins of the statuary. Whitelaw questioned if the busts were artificial stone from the Pulham factory, but the mystery was solved a couple of weeks later when the Duke of Wellington replied via the magazine’s letters page. The Duke confirmed that the ‘canephoræ’ originally decorated the temple at Holkham. Arthur Wellesley, 7th Duke of Wellington (1885-1972) was an architect, and is of course famed in follydom as the designer of Lord Berners’ tower at Faringdon. Canephoræ are caryatids bearing a basket on their heads that serve as a capital (although strictly speaking canephoræ are female, and two of the figures here are male).

In the later years of the twentieth century the fragments were moved to new positions in the tiny front garden, where they remain today. The cottage is now called ‘The Images’ and can easily be seen from the road through the village, and here’s a rather appealing view of it by artist Richard Swallow.

Holkham may have lost the Seat on the Mount, but other fine garden buildings can still be seen including the Obelisk (see the plate above) and the Temple. The latter was built in 1734 after a sketch by William Kent.

And of course there is the mansion itself and the wonderful collection it holds. The statuette representing the River Nile and the bas-relief panel remain in the family collection (not currently on display), although the latter has fallen apart and is now incomplete.

Coincidentally (i.e. the Flâneuse is not on commission) the cottage is currently on the market. There’s more here. Everything you need to know about Holkham can be found on their website.

For information on sculpture at Holkham the Flâneuse is indebted to The Holkham Collection of Classical Sculpture by Elizabeth Angelicoussis.

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Hubert Walter Wandesford Fenwick, architect turned architectural historian and writer, was a regular contributor to The Scots Magazine, a monthly publication that claims to be the oldest magazine in Britain still in publication, having been launched in 1739. In 1965 Fenwick wrote an article about ‘Features and Follies’, in Scotland, illustrated with his own very attractive colour sketches.

Fenwick (1916-2003) starts, as so many writers on architectural curiosities do, with the thorny question of how to define a folly. He quotes the Universal English Dictionary which states that a folly is a ‘useless, fantastic structure, built from foolish caprice’, but he does not think it is an accurate description. He then launches into an analogy which the Flâneuse rather likes: ‘… after all, most oil paintings are useless, unless they happen to cover a gap or a dirty mark on the wall. Most paintings are fantastic, some even foolish, but they, nevertheless, tend to make life more interesting and civilised, and they express an aspect of the human spirit.’ It is, he concludes, the same with a good folly. He is however strict about his classifications of what is a folly and what is a feature.

McCaig’s tower at Oban, for instance, is a feature, not a folly, as it was originally intended as an ’eminently practical’ museum. According to Fenwick’s rules, the Wallace Monument at Stirling is a commemorative tower, not a folly.

The buildings that do qualify as folly in Fenwick’s opinion are a particularly lovely bunch, and amongst his selection are The Whim at Blair which he describes as a ‘dummy fort’, the sham ruin on Balcarres Crag in Fife, the tower on Kinnoul Hill in Perth which was built to show that the Tay was the equal of the Rhine, Ossian’s Temple (aka the Hermitage) at Dunkeld, the Craigiehall Temple and Hume Castle which is a ‘magnificent fake’. The Pineapple at Dunmore is included for its ‘extremely clever and imaginative design’.

Fenwick wrote the piece in response to a book about follies which he had recently read. He felt cheated as it contained ‘less than a dozen Scottish examples’ (actually there are exactly twelve), and only two that ‘could legitimately be so designated’. He failed to name the book, but he does give the clue that it was produced by a ‘petrol firm’, so we can be sure it was Follies, written by Ella Hatt, beautifully illustrated by Paul Sharp, and published by National Benzole in 1963 (there’s more about that book here.) In case you are wondering, the two true follies that Fenwick approved of in the book were the sham on Balcarres Crag and the Hermitage at Dunkeld.

You can read more about the history of the Scots Magazine here.

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In the early decades of the nineteenth century Lord Rolle of Bicton House in Devon, developed land by the sea in Exmouth in a bid to attract tourists. He made ‘commodious gravel walks’ and created gardens with rustic benches, as well as building elegant marine residences. Lord Rolle also granted a lease on a plot of land to one William Kendall, who in 1824 built a ‘very pretty’ house modelled on the Temple of Theseus in Athens.

The property had a lodge in the form of the ‘Temple of the Winds’, also in Athens, a building more correctly known as the Horologion of Andronikos Kyrrhestes but colloquially as the Tower of the Winds. It is not in sight in Hallet’s view (above) but appears in the centre of James Fidlor’s View of Exmouth:

Little seems to be known about Kendall (1767-1832). He was a solicitor based in Exeter, a founder member of the Devon and Exeter Institution and a poet. He died in March 1832 and his will shows he had a fine art collection. An account of a sale of his collection after his death includes works by Canaletto, Reynolds and Rubens and a ‘Splendid Landscape by Wilson’, as well as classical statuary, an Etruscan vase and bronze models of the Elgin Marbles. So here is a hint of the interest in classical antiquities that must have been the stimulus to build models of ancient temples at his English seaside home. No other account of his inspiration seems to have survived.

The ‘elegant and substantially built residence’ was offered for sale by private treaty soon after Kendall’s death. The six-acre estate had delightful land and sea views, and the house was described as a ‘chaste model of the Temple of Theseus at Athens’. It seems there was little interest, and the estate was again offered for sale by auction in 1842, at which date it was still owned by Kendall’s executors.

It must have been soon after that date that Henry Ward bought the property (he died in 1848 when the house and grounds were once more offered for sale). He goes down in history as having ‘corrupted’ the Temple by putting in bay windows and ‘sticking on it two lateral appendages’. We learn this from Rev. William Webb’s Memorials of Exmouth published in 1872, by which date the Temple was a feature of the grounds of the Imperial Hotel and the ‘Temple of the Winds’ had been demolished. Webb described the surviving temple as an ‘exact copy of the Temple of Theseus’ – the Flâneuse leaves readers to judge for themselves…

The Athenian temple inspired a number of follies and landscape ornaments, including the Penshaw Monument in County Durham, begun in 1844, which captures the spirit of the original but is not an exact copy.

The Temple of Theseus at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, was erected from 1759 to a design by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, who as his nickname suggests had travelled in Greece and specialised in Neoclassical architecture. Like the Exmouth temple, the design of the portico and frieze is inspired by the Greek monument, but the columns on the side elevations are omitted.

Exmouth’s Grade II listed Temple remains within the grounds of the Imperial Hotel, and at 200 years old is in a somewhat tatty state (the facade is maintained but is a different story round the back). The Temple of Theseus in Athens (more correctly the Temple of Hephaestus), constructed in the 5th century BC, has fared rather better and remains a major landmark in that city.

Thank you for reading. As ever, your thoughts are most welcome – scroll down to the foot of the page to find the comments box.