Searching for an image of the Egyptian Spring, a garden ornament at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, the Folly Flâneuse found a picture postcard from the early years of the 20th century. But instead of the usual cheery message to a friend, the back of the card promised palatable prizes. So why was a folly being used to promote foodstuffs?

(Please indulge this brief diversion – we will return to the garden ornament in due course…)

Food manufacturers Symington’s were innovators in the field of customer promotions. As well as branded giveaways such as books of needles, thimbles and stamp books, the company produced picture postcards and asked shoppers to send them on to their friends.

The friend would then visit the grocer and ask for Symington’s ‘Table Delicacies’ in the hope of finding one of the yellow prize vouchers which were slipped into randomly selected products. The voucher entitled the holder to rewards such as a ‘box of samples’, or the latest cookery book. There were further rewards for those who recruited new customers via the postcard promotion.

The Folly Flâneuse was disappointed to discover that the campaign did not take follies as an overall theme, and the Egyptian Spring was possibly chosen for the marketing campaign because around the turn of the 19th century Symington’s claimed to be one of the first manufacturers to ‘promote the benefits of a healthy diet with their Egyptian food range’. The only other topographical card found to date featured a scene in Ceylon – presumably because Symington’s sold tea. Other cards had a more overt message:

After going off at that tasty tangent, we must get back to the garden ornament that started it all: the Egyptian Springs at Lower Hartwell.

It was commissioned by Dr John Lee (1783-1866) of Hartwell House as a garden ornament over a natural spring, and built in around 1850-1851 to a design by Joseph Bonomi junior (1796-1878)

Lee had a museum of Egyptian antiquities in the house and he had the well decorated with hieroglyphics, including a cartouche with characters that spell out (Queen) Victoria:

The building also had a Greek inscription, taken from Pindar’s First Pythian Ode, which translated as ‘Water, of all the elements is the best’. Early accounts of the Egyptian Springs suggest that this quotation was chosen because Lee was an advocate of temperance.

An account of 1912 states that inside the building there were carved lists of ‘celebrated men who were temperance reformers’. The author surmised that it was these unpopular temperance principles that led to the neglect of the temple after Lee’s death in 1866. By 1903, when the postcard below was sent, the building was looking pretty shabby.

By 1981 the building was described as looking ‘like a well-vandalized bus shelter’. Happily it was restored that same decade after Richard Broyd’s Historic House Hotels group rescued Hartwell House and turned it into a hotel. The spring and other garden features were restored under the supervision of architect Eric Throssel.

To end on a sweet note: Barbara Jones called the Egyptian Springs a ‘trifling curiosity’.

Although no longer in family ownership, Symington’s are still manufacturing today, so in return for this 21st century promotion the Folly Flâneuse awaits her box of ‘table delicacies’.

Hartwell House was given to the National Trust in 2008. The grounds are open to hotel guests only, but the Egyptian Springs can be found by continuing along the lane past the hotel entrance https://www.hartwell-house.com/

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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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Spottiswoode House, was described in 1846 as a ‘stately and elegant edifice in the old English style of architecture’. The estate had been ‘possessed, time out of mind, by the Spotiswoodes’ and was the childhood home of Alicia Anne Spottiswoode. It became her retreat in widowhood and the place where she was remembered for having ‘a weakness for erecting curious stone archways and other little monuments here and there’.

Alicia Anne (1810-1900) was one of the children of the Laird, John Spottiswoode, who built the new house to designs drawn up by William Burn in 1832. Alicia Anne lived a life typical of the age and was educated at home in the arts of literature, drawing, singing and conversational French. But she was also passionate about botany, geology, history and archaeology, and loved to be outdoors.

In 1836 she married Lord John Douglas Montagu Scott, second son of the 4th Duke of Buccleuch. After his death in 1860, Lady John, as she was known, seems to have developed what were generally described as eccentricities, although one article suggests she was seriously disturbed by her husband’s death, and continued to live as if he were alive – writing him letters and having a place laid for him at the dinner table.

In her widowhood Lady John lived mainly at Spottiswoode, and the property became hers for her lifetime following the death of her mother in 1870. She then became known as Lady John Scott Spottiswoode to meet the terms of her father’s settlement. Her motto was Haud Fast to the Past and she had a passion for local history, and supervised a number of archaeological investigations on the estate.

Best remembered today for the song Annie Laurie the ‘most popular of Scottish melodies’, Lady John deserves to be better known for the curious works in architecture with which she bedizened the estate. These included two curious arches which, by map evidence, were constructed between 1857 and 1897. One stands in the tiny hamlet called Pyatshaw (named for the burn, or stream, that passes by).

It has inscribed stones built into the base, of which only one is even vaguely legible today. That which can be read (with difficulty) can be identified as one of the riddles, or ‘ænigmas’ put to Zadig and others in Voltaire’s 1747 novel of the same name. Zadig is asked:

‘What is this thing we receive without being thankful for it, which we enjoy without knowing how we came by it, which we give away without knowing where it is to be found, and which we lose without being conscious of our misfortune’.

Zadig is the only one who can solve the philosophical conundrum – the answer is ‘Life’. A second riddle solved by Zadig describes ‘Time’, and perhaps this was the inscription now eroded from the other stone? Sadly no local historians seem to have transcribed the plaques, although in 1912 a Mr Bradley wrote that one of the estate lodges had ‘a stone bearing a Latin description’. But to the Folly Flâneuse’s great disappointment he continued that it was ‘not worth recording’.

The second arch is close to the Bruntaburn (again named for a watercourse) Lodge, but is easy to miss as it is almost totally engulfed in ivy.

Sadly Lady John’s motive in erecting the arches is not known, but she is remembered as a great philanthropist and they may have been built to create employment locally. If they commemorate individuals or events then that association has long been forgotten.

At one of the entrances to the park stand two matching buildings known as the Eagle Lodges, or the Clock Lodges. The eagles which gave the lodges their name (seen in the postcard below) are no longer in situ, but the ‘clocks’ remain.

Although the lodges are thought to be late 18th century in origin, Alicia Anne is credited with giving them the embellishments which make them so fascinating today. Each lodge has a crenellated gable wall which carries a dummy clock – one always gives the time as 1.53 and the other 11.11 and the story is told that these were the times that the mail coach arrived at Spottiswoode. Each cottage carries two boards giving the distances to postal towns as near as Edinburgh and as far as Portsmouth.

Only a few years after Lady John’s death the antiquarian Alexander Curle, Secretary of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland, visited Spottiswoode and noted the clock lodges and, more vaguely, the many ‘evidences of Lady John’s eccentric tastes’. Not known to survive today, but also a great curiosity, was Lady John’s coach which Curle described as ‘a great clumsy vehicle’ which was modelled on Napoleon’s.

Lady John died without issue in 1900, and Spottiswoode House passed to a grand-nephew. The place was not maintained and by 1912 was already looking ‘forlorn’. Spottiswoode was sold in the 1930s, when it was said that ‘time has played havoc with its wide domain’, and the house was pulled down in 1939. The stable block was converted into a residence in 1996 and a new house built in the grounds at the same date.

Happily the ornaments erected by Lady John survive. The arches are both listed at category C, and the Clock/Eagle Lodges are category B. All can be seen from public roads.

Top marks to anyone who spotted the non-indigenous wildlife in the top image. Here’s the friendly little fellow who adds further charm to the hamlet of Pyatshaw.

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Driving through South Yorkshire on the A1, it is possible to catch a glimpse of a small square structure just off the south-bound carriageway. This is Robin Hood’s Well, near the village of Burghwallis, and it is probably the smallest structure in the canon of the great architect Sir John Vanbrugh. It was commissioned by the Earl of Carlisle and Vanbrugh probably dashed off the design from his carriage, en route between London and the earl’s seat of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire.

A well had existed on the spot long before the earl decided to cover it over early in the 18th century. No doubt the earl, like other travellers, had been unimpressed with the dusty roadside waterhole and commissioned Vanbrugh to offer it some protection. In 1725 a traveller in the party of the Earl of Oxford saw the  ‘new stone building’, but thinking it a little plain suggested that it be adorned with statues of Robin Hood and Little John. He also composed a few lines on the subject of the well:

If parch’d with toil, or heat, thou burn
Invited taste this limpid flood;
And boast wherever thou sojourn,
Thou once hast drank with Robin Hood.

Originally the well was built against a park wall and there were steps down to the water. An elderly retainer was on hand to serve water to travellers, although there was also an inn, ‘at the sign of the Robin Hood’, for those wishing for more sophisticated refreshments.

In the early 1960s the road was converted to a dual-carriageway, and the well cover was carefully dismantled with the stones numbered ready for re-erection. The Earl of Ross, of nearby Womersley, stored the stones in his stables until the works were complete and the building could be reconstructed. In 1964 it was rebuilt around 300 metres away from its original position at the water source. In 1993 a stainless steel frame was inserted to support the roof and safeguard the well’s future.

This view of Robin Hood’s Well by S.H. Grimm shows another ornamental building in the background (look closely). This is the Barnsdale Lodge, or Summer House, still a prominent eye-catcher high above the road when heading north on the A1, especially when it catches the sun. This landscape feature was designed by John Carr of York for Bacon Frank of Campsall Hall in around 1784, and its ‘extensive and beautiful prospect’ was much admired.

Incidentally, Barnsdale also gave its name to the nearby Barnsdale Bar services, once one of chic roadside eateries pioneered by the Forte family. Like the well it too has disappeared, and today’s motorists thunder by in search of refreshment elsewhere.