In rural Northumberland an elegant stone column rises in a field. A passer-by would guess it to be an eighteenth century ornament, and they would be right: work to erect it was completed in 1786. But it was not built in Northumberland, where it has stood for a mere century. The monument actually started its life at Felbridge in Surrey, some 350 miles to the south.

The monument was commissioned by James Evelyn (1718-1793) of Felbridge Place, in Surrey, from the architect Sir John Soane, whose original designs show a fluted column. This was rejected in favour of a plain column, but this tweak to the design would still keep the stonemason busy: the shaft carries a Latin eulogy to Evelyn’s parents, and is also inscribed with the 13 verses of Joseph Addison’s Hymn to Gratitude — or rather 14 verses as the penultimate verse was added to Addison’s original. The story goes that a local clergyman felt 13 verses was inappropriate and added one of his own. The drum is carved with the motto Manners Makyth Man and is encircled by a snake swallowing its own tail, representing eternity. Just two years after its completion The Honorable John Byng passed by and noted the ‘extraordinary monumental obelisk’.

The serpent gave rise to the local legend that the monument was erected to mark the spot where two people and a horse were killed by an enormous snake. A local reporter called the story ‘absurd’, and was bewildered that it was ‘firmly believed in by many local people’

The Felbridge Place estate changed hands a number of times after Evelyn’s death. In 1924 it was on the market once more, with the ‘memorial column’ included in the deal. A year later a diarist in a local paper wrote that the column was deteriorating rapidly, and that if something wasn’t done soon the top of the ‘grand piece of stonework’ would come ‘crashing down’. He ended with a question: ‘will not the owner of the estate show sufficient interest to have it repaired?’ In short, no, they wouldn’t, as the land was destined for lucrative housing development.

But someone who did show an interest was Stephen Aitchison (1863-1942) who had recently bought and restored Lemmington Hall, near Alnwick in Northumberland. History does not seem to record how Aitchison learned about the monument, but he purchased it and the plot of land on which it stood. The monument was dismantled in February 1927, and a local paper reported that ‘while deeply regretting that there was so little public-spiritedness in the village of Felbridge that this beautiful obelisk was not acquired and preserved in situ, it is gratifying to know that it is not to be demolished but is to grace northern instead of southern England’.

The dismantled monument was then moved north to be re-erected as an object in the park at Lemmington. Writing in Country Life in 1978, Margaret Hudson states that the work was completed in 1928 at a cost of £1,470.

It is appropriate that Aitchison was erecting a monument to gratitude in 1928, for the New Year Honours list of that year bestowed upon him a knighthood (he would be created a baronet in 1938). Although some of the lettering on the monument was recut after it was moved north, the family appear to have added no words of their own.

And now a confession: the Flâneuse did not see the column at close quarters as the field in which it stands was home to a herd of boisterous beasts. Hence the slightly blurry image above, taken from the edge of the field. But the excellent Geograph website saved the day with this image:

Meanwhile, the Uncouth Companion was earning his wings as a trainee drone pilot:

In 1995 Felbridge Parish Council began to consider how to mark the Millennium. One suggestion was that the column be returned to its original home. It is unlikely that anyone took this suggestion very seriously, as the cost would have been enormous (even assuming that the then owner had agreed to part with it). Unsurprisingly, the column (grade II*) remains in its northern home.

And as if the lovely column wasn’t treat enough, after viewing the column you can turn and look to Lemmington Branch, a castellated hilltop folly (history yet to be investigated) now converted into a very smart house.

When James Evelyn, the original builder of the monument, wasn’t commissioning fine monuments he was carrying out good works. As well as founding a village school he established the splendidly named Beef and Faggot Charity which ensured that the poorer members of his local community were cared for. There’s an account of the charity, which continues today, here.

You can read the whole of the hymn featured on the column here.

Lemmington Hall was leased for many years to a convent, but was sold by the Aitchison family early this century. It has recently been renovated as a wedding venue.

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On the edge of Alnwick, in Northumberland, stood Swansfield House, an elegant villa that in the late 18th century was home to Henry Collingwood Selby (1748-1839), agent to the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland of Alnwick Castle. Following the lead of his monument-building patrons, he embellished his small estate with a tower, a column, and a curious gothic structure.

In 1789 Selby had married Frances Wilkie, and they settled at Swansfield with its ‘beautiful walks and plantations’. Soon after the couple commissioned a watercolour from the artist John Downman: the work is particularly poignant, for Frances died in childbirth on the first day of August 1790. The child survived, and was named Frances Wilkie Selby in honour of her mother.

Henry Collingwood Selby erected a monument to his wife in St Michaels’ church in Alnwick, and lived on at Swansfield for another five decades. As well as looking after the Duke of Northumberland’s affairs, he was also Clerk of the Peace for Middlesex for more than six decades. His story is not well documented, and the little we know tells that he was kind to the poor of Alnwick, but struck a hard bargain in business – ‘the Duke of Northumberland’s rapacious steward’, was Horace Walpole’s damning description.

On 30 May 1814 the Treaty of Paris was signed, and it seemed that the Napoloeonic Wars were over. Selby decided to erect a monument to commemorate the end of the war with France, and made plans for a column on Camphill, a ‘commanding eminence’ in the parlance of the day, above Swansfield House. Initially it seems he intended the column to be topped by a statue, and he paid 40 Guineas for a ‘fine 6ft Statue of Peace and Victory, with wings, a caduceus, olive branch, cornucopia etc’ from Mrs Coade’s artificial stone manufactory in Lambeth, London. The order also included 4 tablets for inscriptions to ‘fix on the column’ (16 Guineas), and the cutting of the letters for the inscriptions (£21 3s 9d). No architect is recorded, but a strong contender is Newcastle-based David Stephenson (1757-1819); he was architect to the Duke of Northumberland and a regular customer of Mrs Coade.

Three panels praised key figures in the war: Vice Admiral Horatio Viscount Nelson for the campaigns at sea and the ‘decisive victory at Trafalgar’; Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington for having ‘vanquished the armies’; and The Right Honourable William Pitt for his statesmanship during the conflict. The fourth praised the ‘persevering and victorious efforts of the British Empire by sea and land’, and of course preserved for posterity the name of Henry Collingwood Selby, erector of the column.

However, by the time the column was ready to be topped with the statue, it had become apparent that Britain would have to wait a little longer for the ‘peace and victory’ represented by the figure. The ‘downfall of Napoleon Buonaparte’ celebrated in the inscription was short-lived – in Spring 1815 he had escaped and was once more governing in Paris. The idea of the terminating statue seems to have been abandoned, and the Camphill Column is topped with a simple ball, as illustrated in William Davison’s A Descriptive and Historical View of Alnwick published in 1822 (above).

But the figure did find a home on the lawn in front of the house, as shown in another engraving in the same book, and this time it was accompanied by an inscription which brought matters triumphantly up to date with the Battle of Waterloo and Napoloeon’s subsequent surrender:

The Pillar on the Camphill
records the events which led to
the first overthrow of NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE
and the Peace of MDCCCXIV,
this Statue is designed to commemorate
the return of NAPOLEON from Elba, his triumphal entry into the capital,
and his resumption of the sovereign power
in France;
the annihilation of his army
by the DUKE OF WELLINGTON
and PRINCE BLUCHER
at the ever-memorable Battle of Waterloo,
his second abdication,
his surrender to the British Fleet,
and his confinement in the island
of St. Helena;
the second capture of Paris,
the second restoration
of the Bourbon monarch,
and the Peace of MDCCCXV

Another landscape feature stood not far away. This was an ‘unfinished tower […] intended as an observatory’, which the late T.L. Adams had begun before his death, and which Selby now owned. In 1815 Selby celebrated allegiances closer to home and inserted a tablet with medallions of the profiles of the Duke and Duchess, and the ducal coronet. These medallions may have been a gift from the Duke and Duchess, who must have ordered a number from the Coade manufactory. Two appear on the Brizlee Tower, and two at Hulne Abbey, both within Hulne Park, part of the Alnwick Castle estate. Others remain unused in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland.

Frustratingly, no views of the tower are known to survive, but again thanks to Davison we know that the inscription on the tower read:

To the memory of his early patrons the most noble HUGH and ELIZABETH DUKE and DUCHESS of NORTHUMBERLAND, not less eminent for their virtues than distinguished by their rank,
this tribute of grateful affection is dedicated by HENRY COLLINGWOOD SELBY MDCCCXV

Swansfield Tower became one of the noted landmarks on the Alnwick skyline, joining the monuments built by the dukes of Northumberland – Ratcheugh Crag, a hilltop eyecatcher (c.1783), Brizlee Tower (c.1781), and the Percy Tenantry Column in the town centre (1816).

Selby died at Swansfield in February 1839 at the age of 91. His estate passed to his great-nephew, who immediately tried to raise an income by letting the tower, by now known as the Stonyhill Tower, as a dwelling. Potential tenants were told that there was a ‘fine view of the sea’, and that it would make a ‘pleasant residence for a small family’. The tower was again offered to let in 1857 and 1861, but soon after it must have been abandoned. By the middle of the 1860s the ‘three storied castellated tower [which] forms a good feature in the surrounding Landscape’ was ‘getting ruinous thru’ neglect’. That deterioration must have continued as it does not appear on the subsequent maps, and is largely forgotten today.

Selby’s descendants sold Swansfield House to the Duke of Northumberland, and it stood until the 1970s when it was demolished, and a new house erected in its place. A substantial part of the former park is now home to the Alnwick Castle Golf Club, and the Grade II* listed column sits in a small copse within the grounds. The fate of the statue to Peace is sadly unknown.

Also surviving is a very curious feature with gothic detailing. Historic England lists the building at Grade II, and suggest it is early 19th century, which fits with Selby’s building spree, but neither they, nor anyone else, seem to be able to give it a history or a purpose. It is a short stretch of wall with gothic detail, echoing decoration seen at nearby Camphill Cottage and on Alnwick Castle. It is not marked or named on OS maps, and for now remains a total mystery.

For Ratcheugh Crag see https://thefollyflaneuse.com/ratcheugh-observatory-longhoughton-northumberland/

For Brizlee Tower see https://thefollyflaneuse.com/brizlee-tower-alnwick-northumberland/

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A prominent feature in the extensive demesne of Alnwick Castle is the Observatory on Ratcheugh Crag, a ‘stupendous and romantic rock’. The building was one of a number of landscape features planned by Hugh and Elizabeth, 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, in the 1770s, but the sham-ruined eye-catcher was not completed until after her death.

Ratcheugh Crag is an outcrop of basalt, and a watercolour in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland, dated to the mid 1770s, shows it bare. The crag, which is visible from Alnwick Castle, was a popular destination for an excursion, and in 1773 the Duke and Duchess noted their decision to build ‘A Ruin at Radsheugh’, and to lay out a new road along the rocky escarpment. The Duchess died in 1776, which may have put plans on hold, but a visitor in autumn 1782 noted an ‘unfinish’d building above the rock’, and this became the pavilion that stands today.

As work continued to complete this folly, the Duke, or rather the architect Robert Adam, went back to the drawing board and in 1783-84 a series of magnificent designs for a greatly extended symmetrical range ‘proposed to be erected upon the top of a Rock near Alnwick Castle’ were executed. A number are in the Sir John Soane museum, and at Alnwick there are wonderful highly-finished designs for a range in a castellated style (below) and an alternative in an ecclesiastical manner.

But these grand plans were never executed. At Alnwick there is a drawing of Ratcheugh by John Lambert which is annotated with the words ‘drawn from Mr Bell’s original design’. John Bell was the Duke’s mason and builder, and had accompanied the late Duchess on tour, sketching the buildings she admired. This wording suggests that it was Bell’s design that was under construction in 1782, and complete by 1784 when Adam noted on one of his plans (above) that ‘the part shaded light already executed by the Duke’.

The Duke had a new drive laid to the crag to enable visitors to arrive in comfort, and in 1785 the Duke took a guest to admire the ‘building imitating the Ruins of an Old Castle’. The upper room was glazed on all sides, and from it Alnwick could ‘be viewed to great advantage’. The panorama also took in the Cheviot Hills and the North Sea.

The Duke died in 1786 and early the next century his son added an extension to the the ruin (not illustrated) to provide a home for the Keeper, which became known as Crag Cottage. The 1844 tithe map calls the hilltop folly the ‘Ratcheugh Tower’ and by the time of the first Ordnance Survey map of 1867 (surveyed 1861-4) it is marked as ‘Observatory’. The surveyors noted it as a ‘Mock Ruin of which the Observatory forms the Apex’, adding perceptively that it had been ‘erected about a century ago to add to the effect of the naturally beautiful landscape’.

The Crag was celebrated in a very curious poem by John Scafe, an Alnwick-based poet and geologist. In 1820 he combined his interests to write King Coal’s Levee, or Geological etiquette, a versified study of stone, which Goethe described as containing ‘all the knowledge of Geology a man wants’.

Thence to Ratcheugh Crag he pac’d:
– A little wilderness of taste
Dropt on the fertile lands,
And still, by ducal visits graced,
The hoary summit stands.

Northumberland Estates has restored the building, and it continues to be used by the Percy family. There is no public access, but there are occasional open days for local charities, and Ratcheugh Crag and its folly can be admired from public rights of way and the road.

For some stunning drone photos of the observatory, and a short film, visit https://fabulousnorth.com/place/view/ratcheugh-observatory/

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