Wandering in the glorious landscape that is Stourhead in Wiltshire there are vistas to grand classical temples and gothic monuments, but there is also a pastoral scene featuring a pretty little rustic cottage which has inspired artists – from painters to designers of tourist souvenirs – over the centuries.

Stourhead, one of the most famous landscape gardens in Britain, probably needs little introduction here, but in brief it was created by the Hoare family in the eighteenth century. A grand lake is crossed by an elegant bridge, and a walk around the water leads to features including a grotto and classical temples as well as offering vistas to gothic ornaments and a sun-topped obelisk.

The cottage has been described by many names since it was first constructed in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a reference to Pantheon Cottage, and it is also mentioned as the Rustic Cottage or Arcadian Cottage. For many years it was called the Watch Cottage, most likely because it was home to a keeper, but it is now known as the Gothic Cottage. As the watercolour below shows, the picturesque little building was overgrown with creeping plants such as woodbine and clematis, commonly found in cottage gardens.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century the cottage was in frequent use as a summer retreat, with a comfortable sitting room for the ladies of the house. In this period the thatched roof was replaced with stone slates.

In 1946 the Hoare family gave the house and grounds to the National Trust, and the charity’s early guidebooks and maps called the rustic house the Watch Cottage.

The cottage was restored in 2007 and the roof covered with thatch to return it to its original appearance. The Folly Flâneuse dreams of living in such a rural retreat, but only after the crowds have gone home: in 2023-2024 over 370,000 visitors were able to wander around the lake and past the Gothic Cottage. But as an obsessive collector of all things folly, she can gaze upon it in various iterations from the comfort of her desk…

This little pottery model of the ‘Gothick Cottage’ was made for the National Trust by the Boncath Pottery in 1979. The design is by ‘Dorn Williams’ – Miss Dorn Williams produced other decorative and commemorative pieces for the National Trust.

In 1983 Ian Logan Ltd produced a series of tins featuring National Trust properties. Bill Dare produced the illustration used on this tin, which was ‘based on the Gothic Cottage, Stourhead’. Note that both the model above and this tin show the cottage with the slate roof that was in place at the time they were made.

Sometime towards the end of the 1980s the Flâneuse bought a ceramic model of the Gothic Cottage ‘in the tradition of the pastille burners made by the Staffordshire potters early in the nineteenth century’. It was made at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke on Trent, for a company called Recollections Ltd (the recollections of the Flâneuse stretch no further than that). Although the cottage is modelled with a thatched roof, this was acknowledged as artistic licence by the maker.

For more on Stourhead click here.

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