In the middle of the eighteenth century William Aislabie began to create a landscape garden on the banks of the River Ure, near the village of Grewelthorpe. In contrast to his grand estate at Studley, a few miles away, there were few manicured lawns or geometric pools, and instead Hackfall was a ‘sequestered and most romantic place’. Dotted around the grounds were summerhouses and shelters, including a dramatic hilltop tower called Mowbray Castle.

Word soon spread that Hackfall was a place worth seeing, and early visitors recorded their admiration for the place: ‘never was there seen a finer assemblage of wild and variegated nature’ wrote a tourist in 1785. Although visitors frequently refer to the ‘imitations of ruins’ in the pleasure grounds (there’s also a sham-ruin banqueting house), the earliest specific reference by a visitor to ‘Mowbray Castle’ found to date is from the 1780s, which tallies with an account in the archive suggesting work was ongoing in 1778.

By 1801 the gardener, who gave tours of the grounds, estimated that around two hundred parties visited each season. The Yorkshire weather was not always kind, but it didn’t spoil the experience. In 1792 Lord Torrington found ‘so much to admire, so much to celebrate’, despite the rain falling ‘in buckets’. And in 1799 another tourist wrote that he knew of no other place that gave so much pleasure’ even though it ‘rained the whole time’.

When first built Mowbray Castle could be seen from almost every spot within the pleasure grounds, and its ‘isolated situation’ was described as having an ‘extremely happy effect’. William Gilpin, whose comments on landscape were widely-read, criticised the buildings at Hackfall, but few were in agreement. In 1796, the Duke of Rutland wrote that ‘We did not find any room for censure’.

A poem written in 1859 suggested that the castle was an ancient fortification:

Now turn thy steps towards the right,
And view that grand imposing sight –
Tis Mowbray Castle, in decay,
The relics of a bygone day.

But Georgian visitors recognised it as a sham, a ‘very excellent imitation of an ancient ruin’, and praised its natural appearance.

Aislabie’s descendants sold Hackfall to a timber merchant in 1933, and much of the woodland was felled. Happily, the folly survived this period of neglect (although the short section of wall with an arch seen in the early images is lost), and was consolidated as part of a masterplan to restore the pleasure grounds and buildings after Hackfall was purchased by the Woodland Trust in 1989 (with strong support from the Hackfall Trust and other local groups). Sadly the vistas to and from the castle are now largely lost because of tree growth.

Around the time the folly was under construction a boy was born who would grow to great fame as an artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775, 250 years ago this week. He visited Hackfall in 1816, and later worked up one of his sketches into a watercolour now in the Wallace Collection, London.

Hackfall is in the care of the Woodland Trust and is freely accessible to walkers.

J.M.W. Turner clearly admired follies – he painted/sketched the tower at Tabley in Cheshire, Cook’s Folly near Bristol and the Gibraltar Tower in Sussex amongst many others. Click the link in red for events planned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth in 1775.

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Although these pages usually explore ‘folly’ in the sense of an ornamental, quirky, or extravagant building, the word has of course another definition: what the Oxford English Dictionary describes as ‘foolishness or deficiency in understanding; lack of good sense’. Such was the ethos of the short-lived Bank Of Folly, established and closed down within a day.

In 1847 a ‘banknote’ appeared in circulation of which only a few survive today. The promissory note did not offer great riches, being issued by that august institution the Bank of Folly, and offered instead a ‘Promise to make you or any other Person an April Fool on reading this’. The Bank of Folly traded for only one day – or in fact for only a morning if you are one of the purists who believe April Fool pranks expire at noon.

There was a fashion in the 19th century for such ‘skit notes’ and they became very collectable. This example is from the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, but there is also one in the Special Collections at Nottingham University Library, and copies also appear occasionally at specialist numismatic auctions. Many skit notes were issued as a form of marketing, and advertised shops or entertainment. Others, such as the two featured here, were only ever intended as jokes to be circulated amongst friends.

The copy in the Nottingham collections differs slightly from the one pictured above in that it substitutes the word ‘Spooney’ for ‘person’ (look underneath the number top right). ‘Spooney’ is an archaic term for a silly or foolish person: the word was unknown to the Folly Flâneuse, but will surely now enter her vocabulary. The image shows a man carrying out a gesture known as ‘thumbing his nose’, or ‘cocking a snook’, a phrase with seemingly vague origins but meaning to openly show contempt.

Probably produced by the same hand was a more romantic banknote issued on Valentine’s Day 1847:

To conclude, all of this has nothing whatsoever to do with architectural conceits. By way of apology for this April Fool’s Day frivolity, the main image is the absolute delight that is the Museum at Enville in Staffordshire, photographed when the bluebells were out in April 2022.

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At Rydal Hall in Cumbria is an unassuming little garden building. It was built by Sir Daniel Fleming, in the last years of the 1680s, as a summerhouse from which to view of one of the series of cascades on the Rydal Beck that flowed though his estate.

Sir Daniel’s accounts show that the summerhouse was built in 1668-9, and it was described only a few years later as ‘a little grotto [for] retirement’. But its big secret was the ‘very surprising’ view of a tumbling cascade, framed by the window of the ‘Grot-house’. The interior did not have the expected decoration of shells and minerals usually associated with grottoes, but was expensively fitted out with wooden panelling, sadly now lost. Just upstream Sir Daniel added a rustic arched bridge, which gave a view down onto the cascade and to the grotto.

Many descriptions of the grotto were written in the 18th and 19th centuries, when travellers and writers arrived first in pursuit of the picturesque, when Rydal was a ‘must’ on the tourists’ itinerary, and then in reverence of the romantic after William Wordsworth made his home at nearby Rydal Mount, generating another tourism boom (the cascade is mentioned in the poet’s An Evening Walk).

Visitors record being led along a shady walk by a guide who then opened the doors to the simple ‘Rugged House’ to reveal the cataract. In 1812 the guide was ‘a woman bent nearly double with age, who with astonishing alacrity stumped up the hill in a pair of wooden shoes’. (It is a curious characteristic of ‘tourist attractions’ in the 18th century, that the guides were elderly ladies – examples are recorded at the Claife Station and the Bowder Stone in the Lakes, where a blunt tourist found his guide ‘rather deficient in understanding’. At Roslin Chapel in Scotland,  it was noted in 1788 that the ‘old woman who shows it […] is as great a curiosity as the chapel’.)

William Gilpin, famed for his pontificating on the picturesque, found the scene enchanting, and described the beautiful view from the summerhouse window as ‘like a picture in a frame’. A visitor in 1791 appreciated the carefully composed effect seen through the window: ‘over the head of the cascade is an old bridge, and over that a thicket of tall trees – and over that a dark mountain – and over that perhaps a dark cloud’. To the holidaying Londoner this was all very striking, and filled his mind ‘with terror and amazement’. After all this excitement guests could relax and dine in the little room: in 1795 Harriet Clarke recorded in her journal ‘in this grotto we ate, with much pleasure, our morning’s repast’.

Many artists delineated the scene. As well as the views shown here, other works include a John Constable sketch (Abbott Hall, Kendal) and an oil painting by Julius Caesar Ibbetson (Liverpool Museums). But as the keen-eyed will have spotted, they mainly painted the view from inside the grotto, so views of the building itself are scarce.

Many gardens and landscapes would go on to use the concept of the ‘surprise view’. For example at Studley Royal in Yorkshire doors were flung open for the grand reveal of the ruins of Fountains Abbey, and in Scotland the hermitages at Acharn and Dunkeld were both designed to allow a first sighting of waterfalls, but Sir Daniel Fleming’s predates these curiosities by almost a century, and was a ‘picturesque’ viewing station way ahead of its time.

In 1980 the grade II* listed grotto was described as ‘forlorn and neglected’, with the roof falling in and only a fragment of the wainscot surviving. Happily, it was restored in 2005-2007 as part of a major project to renovate the Rydal Hall gardens and park.

The falls are best seen after heavy rain. The Folly Flâneuse, with her usual impeccable timing, chose to first visit in autumn of 2021 during heavy rain, but it was worth getting soaked to see the cascade in full flow. This is the view from a bridge just downstream, not extant when the grotto was built, which enables the grotto and cascade to be seen in one view. Happily a return visit in spring was a brighter experience.

And of course if one visits Wordsworth country in April, one can’t miss the last of the …

Rydal Hall is now owned by the Diocese of Carlisle and is a conference and retreat centre. The grounds are open to visitors throughout the year, and you can continue the more than 300 year old tradition of viewing the cascade from the grotto window. As a visitor wrote in 1799, the ‘lower cascade must ever delight’. https://www.rydalhall.org

For the full history of the construction of the grotto see Blake Tyson’s article in Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, Vol 24, 1980.

For Wordsworth Grasmere see https://wordsworth.org.uk

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Joseph Locke was a railway pioneer. Sheffield born, he achieved great wealth, but business and a career in politics took him away from his native Yorkshire. He remained hugely popular in Barnsley and never forgot the town where he moved as a small boy, which benefitted ‘to a large extent in his liberality’. There was great sadness when his death was announced in September 1860, aged only 55.

The following year Locke’s widow, Phoebe, announced that she intended to create a ‘recreation ground’ for the people of Barnsley as a ‘mark of regard and affection for her late husband’, and 17 acres of land were bought from the estate of the Duke of Leeds. The Chairman of the Board of Health declared himself  ‘exceedingly well pleased with the plans for laying out the ground’, and the local newspaper reported that it was a ‘most munificent gift, and would prove … a pleasure to the inhabitants.’ 

Mrs Locke asked a Mr Edwards, an engineer from her late husband’s railway company Locke & Errington, to travel to Barnsley and prepare plans for laying out the ground. The opening of the park was marked with processions and a general holiday, and commemorated by a medal with a profile of Joseph Locke. On the reverse was a wreath of laurels and the legend ‘The Locke Park, given to the inhabitants of Barnsley by Phoebe, widow of the late Joseph Locke, June 10, 1862.’

Phoebe Locke died in 1866 and left the bulk of her fortune to her sister, Sarah McCreery. In 1871 McCreery travelled to Barnsley with an architect, Richard Phené Spiers, to discuss a substantial enlargement to the park in memory of her sister. The purchase of an extra 20 acres took some time to complete, and it wasn’t until October 1874 that the deeds were presented to the town. William Barron, famed for his work at Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, was appointed to ‘lay out the whole of the park in the form of an ornamental garden’. The Board of Health ensured everything met with the ‘cordial approval’ of Miss McCreery and Spiers.

Spiers meanwhile had been drawing up plans for a monument to Mrs Locke which would sit on the highest point of the park. In July 1875 the papers announced that an ‘elegant tower of observation’ was to be constructed, and in 1876 the design was exhibited at the Royal Academy with the caption ‘Memorial Tower to Mrs Locke; now being erected in the Locke Park, Barnsley, from the design and under the supervision of R.P. Spiers.’ Spiers had studied architecture in  Paris, which was considered very unusual at that date, and the tower was believed to be ‘somewhat of the nature of one in the park at St Cloud, near Paris, destroyed three years ago’; this was the Lanterne de Démosthène, which was desecrated during the Franco-Prussian war. Spiers knew the building well, having captured it in a watercolour sketch in 1858. One can see the influence of the central shaft, but it is far from a slavish copy and Locke Tower is a wonderfully quirky and individual structure. “Did they use an architect?”, asked The Folly Flâneuses’s uncouth companion.

The park extension and tower were formally opened in August 1877 on a day of great festivities marred only by torrential rain. Another medal was produced bearing an image of the tower with, on the reverse, the words ‘In recognition of the generosity of Miss McCreery who on the 7th August 1877 added 20 acres of land to the park of Barnsley previously presented by her sister Phoebe Locke.’

The park was greatly appreciated by the ‘working classes’ who organised a subscription to erect an ornamental fountain to thank Miss McCreery. The fountain was also designed by Spiers. Joseph Locke himself had been commemorated with a larger than life bronze statue by the sculptor Baron Marochetti in 1866. However it is the monuments to the sisters Phoebe and Sarah which are of greatest historic significance, being rare dedications to non-royal women in a public park.

The Friends of Locke Park continue to campaign for investment in the grade II* listed tower and the park. In 2013 the public were readmitted to the interior after £80,000 was spent on the structure but further funding, estimated at around £250,000, is needed to restore the exterior.  A tall hedge and gates are now in the place which rather spoil the proportions, but keep out the vandals. The weather vane with Sarah McCreery’s monogram was blown off in a gale early this century and the Friends hope funds can be found to return it to the tower. Sadly philanthropists like the Lockes and Sarah McCreery are in short supply in the 21st century.

The Locke Park Tower is open to the public on the afternoon of the first Sunday of each month courtesy of the Friends of Locke Park http://www.friendsoflockepark.org.uk

For more on St Cloud http://www.saintcloud.fr/articles/dathenes-saint-cloud-lhistoire-dune-lanterne

The design for the memorial fountain is in the RIBA collection and can be seen here https://www.architecture.com/image-library/ribapix/image-information/poster/design-for-a-memorial-fountain-in-locke-park-barnsley-south-yorkshire-plan-and-elevation/posterid/RIBA99117.html