Chanter’s Folly, Appledore, Devon

Overlooking the River Torridge in the harbour town of Appledore there once stood a tall, square tower. The story is told that it was built by a wealthy shipowner so that he could keep an eye on his fleet, but that the dimensions were miscalculated and it wasn’t tall enough to command the expected panorama. Thus it became ‘Chanter’s Folly’.

The shipping magnate, merchant and entrepreneur was one Thomas Burnard Chanter (1797-1874), and in 1841 it was announced that he had just completed a ‘splendid signal tower fifty feet high’ near the New Quay in Appledore, just north of Bideford. It was praised for its ‘very ornamental appearance’ and although there are few references it seems to have been known during Chanter’s lifetime as Northam Tower (Northam being the parish in which Appledore can be found).

By the time the Ordnance Survey maps were published in the 1880s it had acquired the title of ‘Chanter’s Folly’ and in 1893, the Western Morning News reported that ‘what appears to be a church tower gone wrong, is explained to be Chanter’s Folly. A shipowner, named Chanter, it is said, built the tower for the purposes of seeing his vessels coming up the Channel, but that when the structure was completed it was found that a certain hill baulked the view’. With the tower gone it is impossible to know if the story is true – but it is interesting to note that the tale only appears after Chanter’s death.

In the first decade of the twentieth century the Woda Estate in Appledore was offered for sale. It comprised of a farm and a quarry and ‘an interesting Watch Tower known as Chanter’s Folly’. Presumably the new owner did not find the tower remotely interesting, and it was left to decline. It remained a popular (for some) local landmark and in 1930 there was a call for it to be restored, but nothing seems to have come of it. The tower was a favourite subject for artists, and it was even used to promote provisions:

In 1937 the tower appeared on one of the posters which were affixed to lorries to advertise Shell petrol to motorists. The husband and wife team of Clifford and Rosemary Ellis chose Chanter’s Folly as their contribution to the poster series ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’, all of which featured follies.

Around the same date the artist John Cooper painted this view of Appledore showing the distinctive tower. Although the tower appears intact, it was by then ‘crumbling’ and had been damaged in a storm in 1927.

In 1948 the folly was punningly described as a ‘Cracking Landmark’ as it by now had a gaping cleft from top to bottom. Nikolaus Pevsner saw it soon after and described it as ‘alarmingly close to a quarry precipice’.

That quarry was to become the tower’s last resting place. In 1952 a strong cable was wrapped around the tower before a bulldozer pulled it down and shunted the debris into the pit below. In what is probably the Flâneuse’s favourite folly headline, a local paper headed their report of the demolition ‘Cr-r-u-m-p-h !’, which is apparently the noise made by a folly being pushed into a pit by a bulldozer.

There were complaints that the demolition had been rushed through, but some were happy to see the ‘ugly blot on the skyline’ gone, and were grateful that the bulldozer had done its work ‘before the “historians” could muster their battalions’.

This “historian” thinks it a sad loss.

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