In 1956 John Betjeman’s poem ‘Lord Barton-Bendish’ was published in The Saturday Book, an annual anthology of words and pictures edited by John Hadfield. It told the tale of the eerie mausoleum of Lord Barton-Bendish – but neither baron nor burial place was real.

In December 1955 Betjeman (1906-1984) visited the ‘very pretty village’ of Letheringsett, in Norfolk. He met up with friends who included the Reverend C.L.S. Linnell, who was both vicar and historian of the parish church, and Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Harrod, the writer and architectural conservationist. Linnell and Harrod were working together to compile the Shell Guide to Norfolk (Betjeman was the series editor).

At nearby Letheringsett Hall lived the 3rd Baron Cozens-Hardy (1873-1956) who according to the impertinent Betjeman was ‘in his dotage’ and part of a ‘very pompous’ family. In the village church Betjeman saw the monument to Cozens-Hardy’s father, Herbert Hardy Cozens-Hardy (1838-1920), Master of the Rolls, and 1st Baron Cozens-Hardy and it captured his imagination.

Betjeman invented a mausoleum in which Lord Cozens-Hardy might have spent his eternal rest – he had spotted a hilltop copse of trees in which he thought such a structure might stand. On his way home from Norfolk, on a ‘very cold train’, he composed a poem about the imaginary tomb, which begins:

Oh Lord Cozens-Hardy!
Your mausoleum is cold;
The dry brown grass is brittle
And frozen hard the mould.

Betjeman sent the poem to Billa, with his thanks for her hospitality. His Norfolk friends soon heard about the composition and the Revd Linnell was agog, writing to Betjeman ‘Oh, please, please let me see the verse’.

Betjeman submitted the poem to John Hadfield, editor of The Saturday Book. Hadfield liked the poem, and wanted to publish, but was understandably nervous about using the name Lord Cozens-Hardy. Betjeman consulted the vicar: was the poem libellous, would it cause grave offence to the family? The vicar’s response is not known to survive, but was presumably in the affirmative, so the poem appeared in The Saturday Book under the title ‘Lord Barton-Bendish’, with artist John Piper imagining how the mausoleum might have looked. There does not seem to be a record of why Barton Bendish was the chosen alternative: it is the name of a Norfolk village, nowhere near Letheringsett, and was presumably picked for its scansion and pleasing alliteration.

But Betjeman didn’t try very hard to disguise who the poem was about, and Letheringsett remained the setting. In what was a spectacular piece of mistiming, The Saturday Book was published in September 1956 and the 3rd Baron Cozens-Hardy died only a month later.

The poem was published under its original title of ‘Lord Cozens-Hardy’ in John Betjeman’s Collected Poems in 1958. Lord Cozens-Hardy’s family wrote to the publishers to ask that they might print a reply to refute the ‘creepy’ atmosphere of Betjeman’s poem: the poet described the ‘curious mausoleum’ as a sinister place which the villagers avoided after dark in case they encountered the ghost of Lord Barton-Bendish. Joan Silvester Horne, a member of the Cozens-Hardy family, did however exhibit a wonderful sense of humour by writing a pastiche of Betjeman’s poem. It began:

Oh my dear John Betjeman
Your poem is quite wrong…

Billa Harrod had been Betjeman’s hostess during his stay in Norfolk, and she too had advised Betjeman to change the name ‘in case of hurt feelings’. But there is a happy ending: in correspondence with the Norfolk author Peter Tolhurst, she wrote that Betjeman was later forgiven, and the Cozens-Hardys became friends.

Letheringsett Hall is now a care home, and there is no longer the ‘butler and a footman’ that Betjeman’s poem imagined serving tea on the lawn. Instead, when the Folly Flâneuse visited a few years ago (as the Covid pandemic drew to a close), the garden was occupied by the residents enjoying a rather jolly al fresco performance of Abba’s greatest hits.

Some sources claim that a copy of the poem, signed by Betjeman, can be seen on the wall of the Kings Head in the village. The Flâneuse couldn’t find it, and enquiring as to its whereabouts she was met with a shrug and a ‘John who? Never heard of him’.

The Flâneuse is indebted to W.S. Peterson’s John Betjeman: A Bibliography (2006).

Your thoughts and comments are always welcome – scroll down to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

The Flâneuse is taking a short break and will be back in two weeks.

This folly, both urban and modern, may come as something of a surprise after the elegant edifices of earlier centuries that usually grace these pages. It was built by volunteers to a plan drawn up by architectural students in the early 1970s, and today it provides a safe space for local children to play.

In the late nineteenth century blocks of tenement housing were erected in Islington to provide homes for labourers and artisans. Beaconsfield Buildings (designed by Charles Barry junior) had, by the middle of the twentieth century, deteriorated into slums known, ‘without affection’, as The Crumbles. They were cleared in the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the site became a park with a playground, and in one corner a folly was created using recycled materials such as the cobbles from the courtyards of the demolished buildings.

In 1971, Roger Moody, the local ‘playleader’, asked architecture students at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) to design a shelter for the new playground that was to serve 900 local homes and therefore ‘lots of children’. The team didn’t want a ‘boring box’ and it was decided to build a castle. Stone was salvaged from the site of the flats for use in the construction, and donations allowed the team to buy further materials.

Local children and their parents helped to build the sham fortification – in a division of labour that would be frowned upon in modern Islington, dads were asked to help with building work and mums ‘made the sandwiches’. The building was quickly christened ‘Crumbles Castle’.

There have been threats to the castle and the playground over the years but, with strong local support, it has survived and the park’s facilities have recently been upgraded. The Islington Play Association now operates Crumbles Castle as a space where children can ‘jump, climb, run and enjoy playing’ outside of school hours. What could be better than a folly castle as a place for children to ‘explore the world of their imagination’?

The Flâneuse would love to know the identity of the budding architects who rose to the challenge of building the folly. They are identified only as ‘Cathy and the two Bobs’. Please get in touch if you know more.

Thank you for reading. The comments box is at the foot of the page if you wish to share any thoughts, comments or information.

In 1789 Robert Raikes married the daughter and heiress of Thomas Williamson of Welton House, in the village of Welton, near Hull. Early in the 19th century Robert and Elizabeth Raikes moved to Welton House, and the property passed to them on the death of Williamson in 1809. In 1818 Raikes built an elegant classical rotunda in a romantic dale above the house, which was to be a mausoleum for his family.

Welton House was a substantial mansion and stood in grounds that had been laid out by the Williamson family ‘with such great taste and judgment’ in the later 18th century. There were plantations and rides and a prospect of the river Humber, with ‘innumerable boats’ passing by to enliven the view.

Above the house was a ‘highly picturesque glade, called Welton dale’, and it was on the high ground at the top of the dale that Raikes (1765-1837) placed his ‘small circular temple’. Raikes may have been inspired by the mausoleum his father had built in St Mary’s churchyard in Woodford, London (formerly Essex) in the last years of the eighteenth century, pictured below.

The mausoleum in Yorkshire was consecrated by the Archbishop of York, Edward Venables-Vernon-Harcourt, in August 1825, and Raikes offered the surrounding land to the village as a new burial ground, the churchyard being full. This does not seem to have been fully implemented, although there are graves of members of the Holden, Reynolds and Fitzgerald families, who had connections to the Raikes of Welton.

Sadly the name of the architect has not been recorded, but there is no mistaking the builder for a plaque above the door bears the words AEDIFICAVIT ROBERTUS RAIKES ARMIGER MDCCCXVIII (Built by Robert Raikes Esquire 1818). It is a lovely design with doric pilasters and elegant details include carved reliefs of sarcophagi on the blank bays.

John Allen, minister of the Presbyterian church in nearby South Cave, saw the interior and recorded the inscription on a tablet inside the mausoleum in his The Stranger’s Guide to Ferriby, Welton, Elloughton and South Cave published in 1841: ‘Within this Mausoleum are deposited the mortal remains of Robert Raikes, esq., of Welton House, who departed this life on the 20th day of August, 1837, aged 72 years’. This is the only recorded memorial inscription in the upstairs chamber, although Allen records that Raikes’ first wife and an infant son by his second marriage were also interred in the vault. It is difficult to be sure which members of the family were later laid to rest in the mausoleum: the parish records do not distinguish between burials in the churchyard and interment in the mausoleum. The three ‘beautiful stained glass’ windows seen by Allen are sadly long gone.

The mausoleum originally stood in a pretty little enclosure of shrubs. Within this was a round courtyard and the mausoleum was surrounded by a ‘stone wall and iron palisade’. The wall survives but the ironwork is lost.

The ‘deep, picturesque glen’ of Welton Dale became a ‘place of great resort’ for the inhabitants of Hull and its neighbourhood, and especially those whose ‘avocations necessarily confine them to the pent-up city’.  Picture postcards show ladies in their Sunday best posing in the vale. Allen’s guide recommended the best places to pause and admire the views: these ‘stations’ included a rustic summerhouse, sadly long gone. Subsequent owners, the Harrison-Broadley family, continued to allow access as long as tourists obtained a pass from the farm bailiff in the village.

Not all of the visitors to the dale were content just to stroll and enjoy the scenery. In May 1914 local newspapers reported that thieves had ‘desecrated’ the mausoleum. Having failed to force the door to the mausoleum, they had instead prised up a stone slab to get into the vault. There they opened coffins in search of valuables and stripped lead from the caskets. As the ultimate indignity they propped up a coffin to provide a step to allow them to escape. The report was picked up across the nation with the Belfast Weekly News adding the subtitle ‘Shocking Story from Yorkshire’.

This was not the only attempt to gain entry to the mausoleum. In a 2004 oral history project, a local lady remembered sneaking in with her friends when ‘little lasses’ and finding the opened coffins. She recalled how they tucked the lead back around the coffin of a baby, but not everyone was so (relatively) respectful.

In 1960 two boys were cycling along when they spotted a skull atop a fencepost. One of the boys took it home and his family quickly made him take it to the police. Initially, the police thought it was from an ancient burial, and that is had been disturbed by work on a new road close to where the boys found the skull. The director of Hull Museums confirmed that this was not the case, and the Harrogate Forensic Science Laboratory found it to be a middle-aged female who had died in the nineteenth century. Eventually a youth confessed to entering the vault and taking the skull as a trophy, before panicking and abandoning it where the boys found it.

In 1967 another group of youths were found with a full skeleton propped up on the steps of the mausoleum.  Concerned locals had been trying to locate relatives of the Raikes since the 1940s, and this latest desecration led to further attempts to track down descendants of those in the vault. The question of who should pay for the repairs vexed these family members, many of whom had long ago left the area, with one muttering in 1967 that his ancestors ‘should have made a trust fund to maintain it’.

Some of the descendants, reluctant to invest in a restoration, thought that the mausoleum should be ‘pulled down’, so there was action behind the scenes to secure the building a grade II listing in February 1968. With the assistance of the East Yorkshire Georgian Society, Major General Sir Geoffrey Raikes appointed the architectural practice of Francis Johnson & Partners of Bridlington to oversee work to repair the mausoleum and make the vault ‘vandal proof’.

Visiting some years ago, the Flâneuse was able to walk to the mausoleum, but given the history of vandalism it is understandable that the owners of the woodland have now tried to protect the building behind a barbed-wire fence. The mausoleum can however be seen from Wauldby Road (title image and below) and glimpsed from the lovely footpath through Welton Dale – but only if you visit before the trees are in full leaf and recent tree-planting matures.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts, memories or information please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page.

Overlooking the village of Braunton, in North Devon, a ‘prominent church-like’ tower was once a landmark on the heights of East Hill. It was however ‘less ecclesiastical’ than it looked, being a belvedere that was inaugurated in 1857 in commemoration of Sir Robert Peel and his efforts to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846. Only a crumbling ruin remains today, which is a great shame as it has the most fascinating of histories.

The monument was the work of Thomas Mortimer (1798-1866) who lived at nearby Franklin Cottage. According to the 1851 census, Mortimer worked in the Civil Department of the Ordnance, and contemporary documents note him as a ‘linguist, politician and above all philanthropist’. As a ‘staunch liberal’ he had ‘deep sympathies with the working classes’, and is remembered as one who would ‘rather wipe the dew-drops from the brow of an honest labourer than salute the cheek of a duchess’. He was ‘an ardent admirer’ of Sir Robert Peel (below), to whom the tower was dedicated.

Mortimer was also a poet, and he composed some lines about Braunton, in which he described his reasons for settling in the village:

For here, contented with my humble lot,
I early built myself a lowly cot;
Where varied prospects, land and sea,
All tend to my felicity.

His ‘lowly cot’, which he named Franklin Cottage, stood in a large garden and a zig-zag path led up to Mortimer’s ‘pretty tower’ which had a rooftop terrace, complete with battlements and pinnacles, giving magnificent views.

The tower was described as ‘in course of erection’ when Billing’s Directory and Gazetteer of the County of Devon was published in 1857. When completed, the book announced, the tower would have a greenhouse in the lower storey, a study in the upper room, and an observatory at the top. The author was also informed that a bust of Sir Robert Peel was to be placed in a niche between the second and third floors.

Guests from the worlds of literature and politics met in August 1857 to inaugurate the tower, the building of which had been delayed by illness and death: Mortimer’s wife Elizabeth died in 1848 and his teenage son in 1854, and Mortimer himself had spent two years confined to his cottage with an illness from which he feared he would never recover. A flag was flown from the rooftop bearing three Ps for Plenty, Peace and Peel.

Happily, the long inscription was recorded before the tower fell into disrepair:

This tower was built by THOMAS MORTIMER, a Working Man, in honour of SIR ROBERT PEEL, the first British Minister who regarded the claims of Labour, and who when plainly perceiving the justice of FREE TRADE PRINCIPLES, promptly sacrificed his private predilections, and resigned his leadership of a powerful Party, in order to promote the permanent prosperity of the PEOPLE.

He filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he sent empty away.

While Grandeur’s sons seek Glory’s shrine,
At War’s grim Moloch kneel:
Let Labour lovingly incline
To Plenty, Peace and Peel.

One room in the tower was home to a display of local fossils, and built on at the base was a space described as of a ‘more NECESSARY than ornamental kind’ – in other words it housed a privy. This space was ‘dedicated’ to Benjamin Disraeli, who had clashed with Peel over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, and the inscription demonstrated Mortimer’s aversion to the man:

DISRAELI’S REFUGE
Sneering, jeering, satirical BEN –
Most specious of sophists and spiteful of men.

Inside the ‘refuge’ were what the reporter delicately called ‘some lines appropriate to the place’. This was presumably nineteenth century toilet humour, and the newspaper declined to elaborate further.

Within only a few years of Mortimer’s death the tower’s history had become muddled, with a gazetteer published in 1879 claiming that the tower had been erected in 1833 to commemorate the passing of the Reform Bill. The tower seems to have been left to moulder and by 1936 it was overgrown with ivy and ‘battered by storms’. In that year the local parish council decided to buy the land at East Hill as a public open space, and to accept the gift of the tower from the then owner, Captain Stephen Chugg. The councillors thought the hillside would be the ‘perfect space to celebrate’ the forthcoming coronation (of Edward VIII, although of course it would be George VI who was eventually crowned).

The Flâneuse arrived in Braunton keen to visit the tower and this public space but was, alas, thwarted. For reasons unknown, the council’s purchase of the land does not seem to have gone ahead and, after driving round in circles, she couldn’t find any access to the tower.

Post-war, the condition of the tower had been raised, and an article in the local paper asked if there were any ‘Braunton people sufficiently interested in its preservation to take some action in the matter’. It doesn’t appear that there was any interest, and the tower continued to deteriorate.

By the time the Ordnance Survey map was updated in the 1960s it was described as ‘Peel Tower (Ruin)’. The tower was listed at grade II in 1985, but sadly there is little left of Mortimer’s platform for his views – political and panoramic.

Sir Robert Peel died in 1850 and he was buried at St Peter’s at Drayton Bassett in Staffordshire. With monuments and statues being erected across the country, his family chose to install a simple plaque in the church:

In memory of
The Rt Hon Sir Robert Peel, Bart.
to whom the People
have raised Monuments
in many places.
His Children
erect this in the place
where his body
has been buried.

Among the many monuments raised by the people was another ‘Peel Tower’. This was erected on Holcombe Moor, near Ramsbottom in Lancashire, and opened in 1852. Unlike the Braunton tower, the Flâneuse did not struggle to find this mighty landmark.

Thanks to Rosemary Madgett of Braunton Museum for her help with this post.

… and, as ever, thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box to share any thoughts or further information. If you would like a complimentary folly story in your inbox each Saturday morning, please click the subscribe button.

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.

Pontypool House, in the ancient Welsh county of Monmouthshire, was a seat of the Hanbury family and stood in a park that was described in 1801 as ‘pleasing, wild and diversified’. The writer of this description was taken on a ‘pleasant ride’ up to a ‘summer house’ called ‘the folly’, from which there was an extensive panorama. It was, he concluded, a ‘singular and almost boundless prospect’ which no visitor to Monmouthshire should miss.

That visitor was William Coxe, who published An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire in 1801. Sadly he gives no further detail of the folly, and few contemporary accounts of Pontypool mention it at all. A tourist in 1784 described being encouraged to visit ‘the folly’ to admire the delightful prospect, and wrote that the view ‘far surpasses my powers of description’. Sadly, he failed to describe the folly itself. Another visitor in that same year noted that it was a near two-mile ride uphill to reach the folly.

There was enlightenment from John Evans, a self-styled ‘Juvenile Tourist’ who noted ‘the Folly‘ in 1804 as ‘a summer-house of semi-circular form, built by the late Mr Hanbury’. This was John Hanbury (1744-1784) who had inherited the Pontypool estate from his father in 1765.

But this is all a little complicated. For what is known as ‘The Folly’ today is an octagonal belvedere, of which more below. In his book The Hanburys of Monmouthshire (1995) Richard Hanbury Tenison writes that the Folly was ‘substantially rebuilt’ in the late 1820s, so perhaps that is when the tower appeared?

What is certain is that by the early nineteenth century the Pontypool estate was ornamented with this octagonal prospect tower known as The Folly.  It is marked as such  on the 1st Series Ordnance Survey map, published in 1832, along with its alternative title of ‘Twr Watch’ (Watch Tower).

The estate had by that date descended to John Hanbury’s second son, Capel Hanbury Leigh (1776-1861). Capel Hanbury Leigh died in strange circumstances in 1861, having taken poison ‘accidentally administered by his valet’. The tower seems to have been allowed to decline in his later years, and a visitor in 1864 found the door locked and the seats around the tower falling to pieces. It was covered with graffiti, but the tourist could not help but admire the ‘poetical proclivities’ of the author of this couplet:

Oh, monument most melancholy
Of stupid and egregious folly.

In 1921 Pontypool Park passed into public ownership. The house became a convent and the park became a recreation ground for the people of Pontypool. In 1932 there were plans to raise a public subscription to renovate the tower, which was showing signs of decay. As a clumsy rhyme of 1937 recorded, the tower

…stares at space with a grave, octagonal frown
While winds tear and tug at his crumbling crown

Progress was slow, and as the decade progressed turmoil in Europe pushed thoughts of folly towers from the minds of the public. In 1938 Pontypudlians would have watched as a new complex was built close to the town: this was one of the new Royal Ordnance Factories manufacturing arms and ammunition for the war effort. The site for the Glascoed facility was chosen because its sheltered location meant that the enemy was less likely to be able to target it with bombs, and also because the damp climate was perfect for the handling of volatile explosives.

Sadly the folly tower was in the wrong place at the wrong time: its prominent site near the new factory was thought to make it a conspicuous landmark for the Luftwaffe, and so in 1940 it was pulled down.

After the war there were calls to rebuild the popular local attraction, but once again nothing was achieved. It was not until the 1990s that local campaigners succeeded in getting a replica landmark back onto its hilltop site. The new tower was officially opened by the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) on 22nd July 1994.

Pontypool Park is freely accessible and there are walks to the grotto and tower: it’s a challenging climb and you can’t just drive up in your handsome motor as in the first postcard shown above. The exterior of the tower and grotto can be viewed at any time, but the interiors are only open on designated days.

There’s a delightful 6 mile round walk which takes in the grotto and tower. After the hard work of the climb to the follies it’s a gentle return stretch downhill. You can then saunter back along the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. Allow time to explore the Torfaen Museum when you get back to the park.

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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.

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Moreton House, in Dorset, is the seat of the Frampton family. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was home to James Frampton who remodelled the house and created new plantations and pleasure grounds. When he died in 1784 his friend Captain John Houlton erected an obelisk on the estate to ‘perpetuate a worthy and much-lamented character’.

The designer of the obelisk is known to be James Hamilton (1748-1829) of Weymouth. Little is known of his career in the years before the monument was erected, but he went on to be highly regarded in his home town. In the 1790s he described himself as ‘Builder and Stone Mason’ and, capitalising on Weymouth’s popularity as a healthy seaside retreat, he was also a ‘Proprietor of Bathing Machines’. He designed houses and a church in Weymouth, and his name is prominent on the 1809 monument to George III in the town.

Moreton is about 11 miles north-east of Weymouth. The obelisk stands at the junction of a network of rides in Fir Hill plantation, which had been laid out by James Frampton (1769-1854) as part of his ‘various and great Improvements’. The monument is 77 feet high (23.5m) and is topped with an elegant urn, which is itself almost 10 feet (3m) tall: this was carved from a block of Portland stone ‘near 4 tons in weight’ (4064 kg). A copper bar connects the urn and the shaft to provide stability, and a lightning conductor was in place from the very start to help avert damage by thunderbolt – an occupational hazard for obelisks.

Although the obelisk carries the date of Frampton’s death, 1784, work was not completed until the autumn of 1786. A full description of the obelisk was given in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1787, and was accompanied by ‘an accurate Engraving’.

The article also quoted in full the inscriptions on the pedestal. On the north side, facing the house, was an inscription in English:

This Obelisk was erected
In the year 1784,
By Captain JOHN HOULTON,
As a publick Teftimony
Of his Gratitude and Refpect
For the Memory
Of his much-efteemed
And lamented Friend
The late JAMES FRAMPTON Efq.
Of this Place.

On the opposite face was an inscription in Latin celebrating Frampton’s creation of the landscape and noting the site of the obelisk as one of his favourite spots on the estate.

Frampton’s children thought his estate improvements and charitable works were all the monument he needed, as detailed on the simple plaque to his memory in the church dedicated to St Nicholas. In building the obelisk Captain John Houlton clearly wished to make a more prominent statement of his admiration for his friend.

The obelisk could be seen from miles around, and was a landmark noted by tourists exploring Dorset. In the nineteenth century, like many prominent landscape ornaments, it was a meeting place for the local hunt. Although the woodland has matured, a vista to the obelisk from Moreton House is maintained.

The obelisk has been in a very poor condition for many years now, and it is listed on Historic England’s Register of Buildings at Risk (it is a scheduled monument rather than a listed building).

As the obelisk decayed, the inscribed plaques were moved to the gate of the village cemetery, a short walk from the church, to ensure their survival.

Moreton’s church, commissioned by James Frampton in the 1770s, is a delight both inside and out. After admiring the very attractive and unusual exterior one goes inside to be amazed by the extraordinary light that flows through the clear glass windows. The church was badly damaged by bombing in 1940 and during the restoration green glass panes were fitted.

These were not popular, so the enlightened congregation commissioned the glass artist Laurence Whistler (1912-2000) to design new panes of engraved glass. These were installed between 1955 and 1987, although, after some controversy about the design, the window featuring Judas was not actually installed until 2013.

James Hamilton created another landscape ornament of a very different kind. In 1808 he designed the chalk figure of George III on horseback that is a feature of the hillside at Osmington, near Weymouth.

The obelisk is on private land, but can be seen from the road into Moreton. The church is very welcoming. The Osmington horse can be seen from the A353 north-east of Weymouth (although at the time of writing it is easy to miss as the chalk has washed away and it is a grey shape on the hillside).

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It is not everyday that someone builds a seven-storey brick tower on the edge of one of the busiest and most rapidly-growing towns in Britain, especially in the middle of the eighteenth century, so one would assume that the construction of this folly would have been noticed. Birmingham was home to one of the earliest provincial newspapers – surely the curious structure made the pages? But no, the early history of the tower seems very hard to find. The building was originally referred to as the observatory, or as Perrott’s Monument, but soon became ‘vulgarly’ known as Perrott’s Folly because it was born of an ‘insane vanity’.

John Perrott (c.1704-1776) owned the Bell Hall estate at Belbroughton in Worcestershire, and also had a house in Edgbaston, then a village near Birmingham. Near his Edgbaston home, in rural Rotton Park, he built his tower.

The first history of Birmingham was written by William Hutton and published in 1781. Hutton mentions the ‘observatory’ in passing, but makes no mention of its builder or history. William Pye made an ‘excursion round the town in the summer of 1818’ and saw the ‘observatory’. He recorded that the ‘lofty’ tower was known as the Monument and had been erected by John Perrot [sic] in ‘around 1758’: all later accounts of the tower seem to be based on this account. It was certainly extant by February 1773 when a classified advertisement in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette notes a property near ‘Mr Perrott’s Observatory’. No records have yet been found to identify the architect and craftsmen who created the tower.

It might, however, have been under constriction in 1761, when poet and landscaper William Shenstone wrote to Perrott’s neighbour Matthew Boulton suggesting that Perrott was so busy with his workmen that he was hard to see socially. Shenstone hoped that by inviting Perrott to dine on a Sunday, he could not claim to be otherwise engaged. Although this may of course have been work on Perrott’s Belbroughton estate – but a rare mention of the man is worth noting.

Although we now think of an observatory as a building from which to regard the night skies, in this period it was synonymous with belvedere, literally somewhere from which to observe the view. The upper room is beautifully decorated with ornate plasterwork, suggesting a space where one enjoyed refined refreshments whilst admiring the surrounding countryside.

It seems likely that the tower was also used to view the chase, for the surrounding countryside was used by the hunt. More fanciful are the tales that Perrott built it to give his wife a view of her childhood home in Belbroughton in Worcestershire. Or, that it was erected so Perrott could see his wife’s grave, or the home of the daughter who had married against his wishes, both also in Belbroughton. Great as these stories are, they are pure local legend: as a plaque in Holy Trinity church in Belbroughton makes clear, Perrott’s wife outlived him for many years. But more importantly, the Clent Hills block any view of Belbroughton. His son-in-law was the beneficiary of his will, so it seems unlikely that Perrott disapproved of him. But a catalogue of tall tales is particularly appropriate for this towering folly.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the ‘lofty picturesque building known as The Monument’ was offered for sale. By that date it stood in the grounds of Monument House, a ‘commodious and gentlemanly residence’, but no further information about the tower was given in the sales particulars.

In 1907 the Birmingham Mail pondered the reasons for the erection of the tower and concluded that it was for ‘convivial gatherings’. By that date the views the folly had once enjoyed had been compromised by the growth of Birmingham, now a large city. The paper commented on the contrast between the ‘crisp clear country air on one side and the thick smoky acid-laden cloud which hangs like a pall over the city on the other side’. The paper also questioned the mental stability of folly builders, concluding that the tower was ‘erected to gratify an ill-balanced mind’.

The smog was clearly not an issue for meteorological types and from the late nineteenth century until 1979 the tower was used as an observatory to record weather conditions. Emergency repairs to save the tower from collapse were carried out by Birmingham Conservation Trust, with work completed in 2005.

The tower has since had a number of uses, including as an art gallery and a party venue. Today it is home to Re.Future Collective, an arts and architecture collective formed in 2012 to ‘deliver arts, health and heritage activities to connect communities and to help address disadvantage’. Current projects include an Art Youth Club, workshops for adults experiencing loneliness or isolation and working with asylum seekers to create a mosaic for Perrott’s Folly. The collective is also actively researching the history of the tower, and paint samples are currently being analysed to see what they reveal – these are vibrant and exciting times for the folly.

It is not possible to discuss the tower (grade II*) without mentioning J.R.R. Tolkien. The author grew up in Birmingham, and fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy believe that the folly, and the tower of the nearby waterworks, inspired The Two Towers, the second volume in the series.

Perrott’s Folly and the waterworks tower are easy to find – head to the helpfully named Waterworks Road, just off  Monument Road.

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