As part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture a new landscape ornament has appeared on an elevated spot above the little town of Haworth, best known as the home of the Brontë sisters. Creative Director Shanaz Gulzar commissioned four artists to create site-specific works for Penistone Hill Country Park. The project is called Wild Uplands as the artworks are sited on a lofty and lonely common (the wily, windy moors of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights) that is only ten miles or so from busy Bradford.

County Durham-based artist Steve Messam has created The Tower, a 10 metre high arched structure clad in the raw fleeces of two breeds of sheep that can be found on the local hills: the Lonk and the Derbyshire Gritstone. In his own words Messam ‘draws inspiration from geology, cultural histories, and farming methods, to create installations that bring a sense of place to life’.

Messam’s work references both the importance of wool to the development of Bradford, and the very stone that was used to build the handsome stone town in the nineteenth century (it became a city in 1897). Close to The Tower is a former quarry, and abandoned blocks of stone can be seen scattered on the hillside.

The Tower is built of blocks of plywood and steel mesh around a steel and aluminium frame. The blocks are clad in the untreated fleeces, which echo the muted beiges and greys of the building stone from the quarry.

There’s an immersive sound walk that accompanies the artworks, created by Opera North, or you can just enjoy the ever-changing soundscape of the breeze rustling through the grass and (when the Flâneuse visited) the song of the meadow pipits.

Visitors can walk up to the four installations from Haworth village, or it’s a short level stroll from Penistone Hill car park. The temporary landmark can be seen until 12 October 2025 and there’s more information on the Tower and the other artworks here.

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Most of the structures featured in these pages decorate vast estates or landscapes, or at least substantial gardens. But the sculpture pictured here is something a little different – it started life as a project for men building a reservoir, and later spent many years ornamenting a quiet garden in a Yorkshire village. It is a scale model of the dam and valve tower at Angram Reservoir, north of Pateley Bridge in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, and was built by two of the masons who worked on the construction of the reservoir.

Angram was one of a string of reservoirs built in remote spots along the course of the river Nidd in the early years of the twentieth century. The water was to supply the prosperous city of Bradford: by constructing the reservoirs on high ground, gravity would allow the water to flow to the treatment works on the edge of the city without the need of pumps.

The model was made by the father and son team of Robert Drummond (1844-1920) and his son Duncan (1883-1942) whenever they had some spare time. The 1911 census shows that both men lived with their wives and families on site at Angram, in the specially-constructed ‘temporary village’ for workers constructing the reservoir and massive stone dam.

Although there was a reading and recreation room on site, there must have been little to do in such a ‘wild, solitary spot’, and construction of the scale replica kept the men busy when not at work.

The model was first erected on land near where the Drummonds lived in the temporary housing shown in the background of the photograph above (which the workers christened ‘Angram Terrace’). According to the date stone it was completed in 1913, although the tower on the actual dam carries the date 1916.

The village was cleared when work on the reservoir was complete. The model was then moved to stand outside Bradford Corporation’s Water Works at Chellow Heights, but was threatened with destruction when the works were modernised in the 1970s. It was rescued by the Drummond family and moved to the garden of one of the family in East Morton, near Keighley in West Yorkshire.

There it remained for many years until the house was to be sold, and a new home for the model was required. Robert and Duncan Drummond’s descendants approached the Nidderdale Museum, in Pateley Bridge, to ask if they might find some space to display it: the museum is the perfect home as it already tells the history of the building of the reservoirs. With financial support from Yorkshire Water, the model was restored by monumental masons H.A. Green of Ripon, and moved to stand outside the museum. In summer 2023 the Lord Mayor of Bradford, performed the ceremony to welcome what is now known as the Angram Monument to Pateley Bridge.

In 1921 work began to construct Scar House, an even larger reservoir further down the valley (where Duncan Drummond was also employed). The Chairman of Bradford Council’s Waterworks Committee was Lt Colonel Anthony Gadie, and not everyone supported his decision to invest so much money in the reservoirs. Scar House Reservoir became known as Gadie’s Folly, but Bradford’s naysayers were forced to eat (or rather drink) their words when the city had ample water in periods of drought later in the century. The reservoirs continue to serve the people of Bradford and district today.

There is a circular walk to Angram and Scar Top reservoirs from the Yorkshire Water car park near the village of Lofthouse.

Visit the Nidderdale Museum in Pateley Bridge to learn about the construction of the reservoirs (and much more).

Thank you for reading, and as ever do please get in touch to share any thoughts or further information.

Early in the 19th century Benjamin Farrer built a tower close to his home in Fagley, then a village on the edge of Bradford. The elegant edifice declined after its builder’s death and survived for less than a century. But that was time enough to accumulate the usual fanciful folly stories.

Farrer (1761-1833) built the tower in 1828 and placed upon it a tablet with the inscription:

NOT FOR ANY MERIT. PURE, SINCERE LOVE AND ESTEEM CAUSED THIS TOWER TO BE ERECTED TO PERPETUATE TO ENDLESS AGES THE MEMORY OF SUSAN, JOSEPH, JOHN AND SAMUEL JOBSON, UPRIGHT HONEST PERSONS. ERECTED BY BENJ. FARRER, A.D. 1828.’

In 1876 the local historian William Cudworth painted Farrer as a man who was very careful with his money, calling him a ‘bachelor miser’. He told how Farrer, a wool merchant, would walk to York to sell his goods rather then pay for transport, and concluded that few lamented his death. According to Cudworth those named on the tower had scraped together ‘bits of property’ which they left to Farrer, a man as ‘penurious as themselves’.

Published more than forty years after Farrer’s death, it is not clear how much of Cudworth’s account of his parsimony was fact, and how much had been embellished in the intervening years. Later published sources have been based on Cudworth’s writing, so the story has been perpetuated now for almost 150 years.

What is certain is that the four people commemorated by the tower are Farrer’s mother, Susan (or Susannah) and her three younger siblings: Samuel, Joseph and John. As each of the siblings died, their money and property passed to the last surviving brother, John, and it was he who chose his nephew Benjamin as his heir.

John died in 1826 and Farrer then erected the tower in memory of his mother and uncles, which must surely redeem his character a little: he can’t have been such a skinflint if he was willing to invest some of his fortune in a fancy folly? The roof of the tower was completed by Farrer’s builder, Joseph Watson, in the autumn of 1828, with finishing touches to the interior the following year, when the ‘cubard Doors’ were fitted. Sadly, what purpose the tower served has long been forgotten, but presumably it served as a belvedere, eye-catcher and pic-nic pavilion. It is marked on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map simply as ‘Tower’.

By the time Cudworth was recounting the history of the tower in the 1870s the tower had become a ‘conspicuous object’ in the grounds of Thomas Milner’s Spire Nurseries in Fagley (the area around the tower was known as Spire Fields). Milner leased the ground from the Farrer family from sometime before 1859 until 1882 when the business was liquidated: locals recalled that Milner used the lower storey as a tool shed.

Farrer’s descendants sold the Fagley property, including what had become known as ‘Tower Fields’ in 1899. Sometime around then the upper storey was occupied by a ‘fish hawker’: an undignified end for this once fine tower. Picture postcards of the tower were produced in the early 20th century, but by then the turret was roofless and had become known as the Spy Tower (possibly a contraction of Spire Tower), with the accompanying story that children used to climb the tower to spy on courting couples in the lane below. And of course there were tales that it was haunted, and local children would dare each other to run down the narrow lane that passed it.

In May 1915 it was reported that one side of the tower’s base was bulging, and that ‘it does not seem probable the tower will stand another twenty years, let alone endless ages’. In fact it didn’t survive another year, and by early January 1916 had been ‘reduced to a heap of stones’. The Bradford historian Arthur Harrison remembered seeing the plaque ‘leaning against a shed’ in a nearby quarry in the 1930s, but it is not known to survive today. For some years ‘hummocky rubble’ marked the site of the tower, but the land has since been developed and no trace of this fine tower remains.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are always welcome, as is any further information about the tower. You will find the comments box if you scroll down the page (only your name will appear online, your email address remains private).

Constructed early in the 19th century, this rocky grotto was built in the grounds of Ingleborough Hall, home to the Farrer family. Later it was a favoured spot of Elizabeth Farrer (1853-1937), and has thus became known by the wonderfully comforting name of Aunt Bessie’s Grotto. Here tea was served by the staff, whilst the family enjoyed the wonderful view to Thwaite Scars.

The unusual grotto, constructed out of large weather and water-formed stones, is named as the ‘Station’ on the first edition Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1846-7. The word ‘station’ was popularised by Thomas West in his A Guide to the Lakes, first published in 1778. West recommended a number of viewpoints, or stations, from which the best vistas could be appreciated. However on the tithe map of 1847 it is called the Grotto, and by the end of the century it was marked as such on the revised OS map.

From Clapham village a path runs past a lake (or tarn in Yorkshire parlance), and through the Clapdale glen to the spectacular natural wonders of Trow Gill and Ingleborough Cave. This picturesque route was laid out by the Farrer family from around 1828, and in 1833 it was reported that a new walk was almost complete with a picturesque landscape ‘diversified with hills, rocks, wood, water & a narrow vale’. Although the grotto also dates from this period, there are very few references to it, possibly because most visitors were more interested in describing the sublime natural scenery. A rare mention is made in 1873 when the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics’ Institutes had a summer excursion to Clapham. Arriving at the ivy-clad grotto, which was ‘deliciously cool’, they gave thanks for ‘that taste that has dictated the placing of the grotto in this spot, commanding one of the grandest panoramas’.

Aunt Bessie presumably only resorted to the Grotto in the summer months. Visiting in March it was dank and dripping, and not even a footman with a cup of tea would have made The Folly Flâneuse linger inside.

Bizarrely, the Farrer family of Ingleborough, a Mechanics Institute, a grotto, and the year 1873 all also appear in a completely different story that emerged as The Folly Flâneuse was researching this post.

At the beginning of the 1870s the Mechanics’ Institute of Bradford moved to a marvellous new building (sadly demolished), but the cost of construction left a deficit of £5,000. To raise funds the Art Treasures and Industrial Exhibition was opened in 1873, and over 4 months almost 160,000 people visited the Institute. Alongside the displays of cutting edge technology there were paintings, watercolours and the decorative arts. The Duke of Devonshire lent a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and the wealthy wool merchants of the area produced an impressive array of works by J.M.W. Turner and other prominent artists. 1/- would buy a cold luncheon, and those with deeper pockets could have a ‘quart of Moet’s champagne for 8 shillings: it probably sold well as the patrons included a duke, a marquess, an earl, a bishop and most of the very affluent gentry and merchants of town.

As an added attraction Mr John Parker of Bowling came up with an ingenious use for a ‘dark useless room’ underneath the lecture hall – a grotto of artificial stone. Entry was via a rocky cavern which emerged into a chamber supported by giant pillars covered in native bark. There was a waterfall which fell into a lake with resident (model) crocodile, and ‘every other object connected with such wonderful places as grottoes’. The lack of ‘natural verdure’ was solved by none other than Mr Farrer of Ingleborough House, who supplied ‘a large quantity of mosses and ferns’ to clothe the rocks. Sadly no photographs of the grotto are known.

As an aside, this ‘Squire Farrer’ of Ingleborough was the great-uncle of one of Britain’s most important plant-hunters and gardeners – Reginald Farrer (1880-1920). Reginald’s parents were James and Elizabeth (the Bessie of grotto fame) who became custodians of Ingleborough in 1889, and Reginald would have known the grotto well. Respected both by the gardening professional and the layman, his My Rock Garden, first published in 1907, was a classic which was in print for decades.

Aunt Bessie’s Grotto can be visited on the Ingleborough Estate Nature Trail, which at the time of writing remains open to visitors. But do check the website before travelling  https://ingleboroughcave.co.uk/nature-trail/