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.

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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. 

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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.

Thank you for reading. Please get in touch if you have further information – you can share any thoughts via the comments box at the foot of the page.

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.

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

In the middle of the eighteenth century Ralph Allen, who had both a Bath townhouse and the Prior Park estate in a fine landscape just out of town, erected a gothic eye-catcher on high ground above Bath.  The folly took the form of a turreted and castellated screen, unadorned at the back and intended only to be viewed from the city. By the end of the eighteenth century the folly had become known as the ‘Sham Castle’, and it has attracted the gaze of artists ever since it was built.

In 1755 the architect Sanderson Miller, known for fashionable landscape ornaments, was mooted as the ideal candidate to design Allen’s proposed ‘considerable Gothic Object’. However the folly was claimed as his own by Allen’s Clerk of Works, Richard Jones. In an account of his life Jones, wrote ‘in 1762 began the Castle in the warren, and was built in a quarter of a year to my plan’. To further complicate matters, the folly appears on an engraved prospect of Bath published in 1757. Hence the Flâneuse settling for mid-century as a date, and hoping for further evidence to emerge in due course. What is certain is that Allen died in 1764, so he had little time to enjoy his new landscape ornament.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the folly ‘had been allowed to fall into decay’. The two end towers were crumbling and this was blamed on boys who used the castle as a ‘rendezvous for games’.

The estate was still owned by the Allen family at this date, but financial aid to save the folly came from a different source. In 1880 a local paper noted that restoration was underway thanks to help from an unnamed female benefactor. It was only on her death in 1891 that the identity of the philanthropist became widely known: Mary Downing Russell Elliott (née Scott) had quietly, and unbeknownst to even her closest friends, funded a number of civic projects over the years.

Mrs Elliott’s investment allowed the two end towers of the Sham Castle to be rebuilt and the centre towers to be restored. She also funded the restoration of the obelisk and gardens in Orange Grove, next to Bath Abbey.

The Allen family sold the ‘remaining portion’ of their Bathampton estate at auction in March 1921. This included the Sham Castle and around an acre of ground. This parcel was bought by a Mr Candy, who purchased it with the farm he had tenanted, and from the start he was clear about his intentions of selling the folly soon after. That auction of the Sham Castle was held in June 1921, and various uses for the folly were suggested: a tea garden was a tempting proposition, but one rather alarming suggestion was that an ‘asbestos back’ might be added behind the facade to ‘convert the structure into a bungalow’.

Happily (in the latter instance) there was little interest, and the castle didn’t sell, but good news was soon to follow. In July the local paper reported that ‘Bathonians must have noted with much pleasure the announcement last Thursday that the Sham Castle has been purchased by two gentlemen for presentation to the City’. Mr Candy was given due credit for selling the folly at ‘preferential terms’.

Unlike Mrs Elliott, these donors were happy for their identities to be known, and a plaque was erected acknowledging their generous gift to the city. As the inscription records, some further restoration work was carried out in this period.

The Sham Castle has continued to catch the eye of artists. Richard Guyatt chose it as his subject when commissioned by Shell to produce an image for the ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’ poster series, displayed on the sides of the company’s delivery lorries in the 1930s.

And completing four centuries of views of the landmark, Christopher Gee painted this view of the folly…

… and Ed Kluz depicted the folly in a vibrant collage.

If you are in Bath before 10 May, as well as climbing up to the folly for magnificent views (it is publicly accessible – just follow Sham Castle Lane) you can see Richard Guyatt’s view of the Sham Castle in Poster Power!, an excellent exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery.

Thank you for reading. Comments, as ever, are welcome – just scroll down to the foot of the page to get in touch. 

Walking through a glade on the Cilwendeg estate, in Pembrokeshire, one suddenly encounters the prettiest of buildings: one would not be at all surprised if Hansel and Gretel skipped around the corner. The monochrome exterior, with stepped parapet, conceals a vibrant interior with walls and ceiling decorated with shells and minerals, brightly coloured glass in the windows and a floor inlaid with animal bones and teeth. By the end of the twentieth century this curiosity was neglected and the ceiling had collapsed, but an exemplary restoration means that the building is once more an absolute delight.

Credit for the survival of the Shell House goes to the Temple Trust. In the early 2000s, Suzannah Fleming, Chair of the Temple Trust and fresh from masterminding the restoration of Garrick’s Temple on the Thames, spotted the Shell House on a list of endangered buildings. The owner, local farmer Alan Bowen, was keen to see the building restored, and agreed to sell the building to the Temple Trust, enabling the charity to apply for grant funding.

But to travel back in time a couple of centuries, the Shell House was one of a number of landscape ornaments built by Morgan Jones the younger (1787-1840) on the estate he inherited from his uncle, Morgan Jones senior (1740-1826). Jones senior was the owner of the Skerries lighthouse off Anglesey. Every ship that used the busy shipping route, including all vessels heading for Liverpool, then one of the busiest ports in the world, had to pay a toll. Thanks to this incredibly profitable enterprise, Jones junior was able to live a life of leisure as a country squire.

Little is known of the early history of what we now know as the Shell House, and even its original name is not recorded: it is shown on the 1849 tithe map, and on the later Ordnance Survey maps, but it is not named. Nineteenth-century topographical works praise the beauties of the mansion and the demesne, but fail to mention the ornamental buildings. The first mention of the Shell House found to date is in the particulars when the estate was offered for sale in 1906, where it is noted as a ‘Quaint Grotto and Rookery’. It is thought to have been built by Jones junior in the 1820s, but the designer and the hand(s) behind the shell decoration remains a mystery. Shell houses are generally the work of the ladies of the house but Jones was a bachelor, with no wife or daughters, so perhaps he himself rolled up his fine linen sleeves and got to work. Or could his sisters have been the shell artists? Little is known about Margaret, but Jane Martha Jones (c.1780-1864) was clearly a capable woman, and she ran the estate from the time of her brother’s death in 1840 until she herself died in 1864 aged 85.

The plight of the garden ornament was highlighted in the Save Britain’s Heritage report of 1987, Pavilions in Peril. The author, Julia Abel Smith, wrote that ‘mercifully, this little charmer has escaped vandalism but suffers from neglect’. By the time the Temple Trust purchased it in 2003 the interior was in a sorry state, but enough of the shell decoration survived for an informed restoration to take place. The Temple Trust raised £156,000, from a variety of sources to enable work to begin.

Local conservation architect Roger Clive-Powell (1944-2015) was commissioned to oversee the restoration, and shell artist Blott Kerr-Wilson to recreate the interior. Cambria Archaeology conducted an exhaustive study of the building and excavated the area around it to salvage the remnants scattered around. They found that unlike many a Shell House, embellished with exotic specimens brought back from distant shores, the Cilwendeg garden house was decorated almost exclusively with shells from nearby Pembrokeshire beaches: mussels, cockles, oysters, razors, whelks, limpets and otters.

Blott scoured local beaches for replacement shells, aided by her apprentice, who was none other than the multi-tasking Suzannah Fleming. When replacements for the few non-indigenous shells that had once decorated the walls were needed, an appeal was made. Local residents quickly found the required pink conch shells in their family collections (many were descendants of merchant seamen) and donated them to this wonderful project. Blott remembers that finding the sheep knuckle bones and horses’ teeth to restore the floor was a less pleasant process, best glossed over.

The roof had collapsed, and this was the one area where the decorative scheme had been completely lost. Suzannah, Roger and Blott worked together to design a new pattern for the reinstated ceiling.

And there are some delightful finishing touches…

The two windows were restored with new stained glass based on fragments found on site, and even on the dullest of winter days the light streams through. The restoration was completed in 2006 and was awarded the Georgian Group’s prestigious Award for the Restoration of a Georgian Garden Building a year later. Few shell houses of this complexity survive and of those that do, for obvious reasons, there is little or no public access. The Temple Trust should be lauded for not just saving this rare example, but for its commitment to welcoming visitors to this exquisite little building.

Twenty years on there are new challenges, and a corrugated iron cover, supported by scaffolding, is currently keeping the building dry in preparation for remedial work to damp proof the front and rear gables. Planning permission has been granted and a fundraising campaign is about to be launched, so if you are able to help in any way click here to find out more.

The Shell House awaiting work to prevent water ingress. The wooden porch was long-gone but has been recreated based on the evidence discovered during the survey of the building. The Flâneuse visited on a murky February morning, so here is Suzannah’s cheerful photo taken on a brighter day:

The Shell House can be seen between 1st March and the end of December, but visits must be pre-booked. Further information can be found on the Temple Trust’s website. The mansion and further picturesque estate buildings are strictly private.

Huge thanks to Suzannah for her help with this post. Thank you for reading and, as ever, you can share your thoughts via the comments box at the foot of the page.

In 1922 the writer and illustrator Charles George Harper penned a series of three articles about follies for The Architect magazine. Harper was a prolific author and had noted many follies as he toured the nation, often including them in his books on the topography of Britain. The articles were illustrated with his own vignettes of some of the buildings he admired (or censured). As for the foibles, which some may find a rather weak description of the eccentricities of Harper’s character, read on…

As ever in a feature on follies, the author had to deal with the question of a definition. Harper (1863-1943) concluded that a folly was a ‘pleasant fancy’ in the shape of a garden-house, a gazebo or perhaps even a ‘skyline freak’. As he continued, ‘now we have settled the nature of follies, the next thing will be to find some’. This, he thought, would be far from difficult, as the ‘land abounds with them’. Harper was sure that once a folly had been found, ‘the traveller who happens to be of a speculative turn of mind will find his curiosity greatly piqued to learn the story’.

Harper began with the building which he thought was ‘architecturally the most interesting’: the Triangular Lodge at Rushton in Northamptonshire. This was, he wrote, a building in which ‘Sir Thomas Tresham gave full outlet to his peculiar bent of mind’ by building a structure in which all measurements and decorations were governed by the ‘mystic three’.

In Cornwall Harper visited a ‘prime curiosity of the gruesome kind’ in the form of the mausoleum of Sir James Tillie. The monument was then derelict, but peering through a small gap the statue of Tillie could be seen – a ‘ferociously ugly man, with scowling countenance and great protruding paunch.’

Jack Fuller of Sussex (best known as Mad Jack Fuller) was described as ‘one of those squires who could not leave a hill-top alone in its natural beauty, but must needs place on it something in the way of a building, generally something ugly’. This was illustrated with a view of the Sugarloaf, supposedly erected to help Fuller win a bet that he could see Dallington church spire from his home. In fact he couldn’t, and the story goes that the cone was erected in a great hurry to ensure he won the wager.

William Beckford was noted as a man who frittered a fortune building towers, and an elegant sketch of his surviving tower in Bath was included in the article.

Harper was known for his strong opinions, and wasn’t afraid to air them in print. An anonymous review of his The Marches of Wales in The Athenaeum in 1895 noted how he went into ‘rhapsodies on discovering a Conservative cobbler’ but ‘shrieks against Dissenters, teetotallers and Radical politicians’. He was also accused of passing a ‘somewhat unjust judgment on the character of the Welsh people’.

To this list of pet hates might be added the women who were (to his mind) threatening the established order. In particular, Harper was no fan of the increasing numbers of female journalists who had ‘invaded newspaper offices’ and who were all more interested in the ‘cut of a dress’ than the ‘fall of a statesman from office’. He makes this sweeping statement in 1894, in a book that was a curious departure from his usual travelogues: Revolted Women: Past, Present and to Come. After what Harper called Eve’s ‘stupendous faux pas‘, he wondered why womanhood wasn’t content to ‘sit, for all time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot’ instead of aspiring to rule men while they had ‘no efficient control over [their] own hysterical being’.

But back to follies…

Harper also noted that not everything called a folly was actually a built structure with an interesting history. As an example, he gave the hilltop clump of trees in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) which had long been known as Faringdon Folly. One wonders what he made of the tower that Lord Berners erected on the summit only a decade or so later: no doubt it would have fallen into the ‘skyline freak’ category.

All of the follies mentioned are publicly accessible. Most have been covered in these pages – the search function will take you to the relevant posts.

Assuming she can control her own emotions (Harper didn’t think this possible of any females, especially writers) the Flâneuse will be back with another folly story next week. Thank you for reading.