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. 

Horton Tower, also known as Sturt’s Folly, is one of those enigmatic erections whose history is vague and usually explained in sentences that begin ‘said to have been…’. What is not in question is its magnificence: seven stories of red brick soaring skywards in the middle of a field. 

Many sources will tell you it was built in 1750, a few give a date of 1700, and Pevsner amongst others says 1726. All are agreed that it was built by Humphrey Sturt, but just to complicated matters there was a Humphrey Sturt senior (1687-1740), and his son Humphrey Sturt junior (1724-1786).

The tower was there by 1765 when ‘Horton Observatory’ was marked on Taylor’s Map of Dorset, published in that year, and a coloured vignette appeared on the 1795 edition of the map (above). Over the next couple of decades it is mentioned by the occasional tourist who passed by, but seldom with any further detail. The only account that gives any description is that of the historian Edward Gibbon: he saw the tower in 1762 and admired the ‘elegant turret 140 feet high’, but complained that the estate was in ‘no order’, and the tower used as a granary.

It seems unlikely that Humphrey Sturt junior would neglect such a wonderful tower only a decade or so after building it, so 1750 seems wrong, and it is equally unlikely that Humphrey Sturt senior built a tower when he was 13, so by deduction 1726 seems the most likely date, although the source for that date remains elusive. Thomas Archer has been suggested as the architect, but again evidence seems hard to find. What we do know is that the vast tower quickly became known as ‘Sturt’s Folly’.

One local story is that Sturt built the tower to overlook the Earl of Shaftesbury’s adjacent estate at Wimborne, the two men being said to be ‘at variance’. If there is any truth in this tale, then the Ashley-Cooper family must have secretly admired the lofty building, for they bought Sturt’s estate in the late 18th century and left the tower standing.

This is prime hunting country, and the tower would have been used to view the hunt and take refreshments, as well as being an ornament to Sturt’s deer park, which also featured a large piece of water (now lost). At the end of the 18th century the folly was put to a very different use by the Royal Ordnance: lofty towers across the country were used for the huge trigonometrical survey that allowed highly accurate maps to be produced. As the 19th century progressed the tower remained a focus for the hunt, with the East Dorset Hounds and other packs meeting at the building.

By the start of the 20th century the building was falling into disrepair, and falling out of fashion. In 1906 Sir Frederick Treves published a celebration of his birth county called Highways and Byways in Dorset. Treves was better known as a surgeon specialising in appendectomy, and is credited with saving the life of Edward VII in 1902. It seems fair to say that he would have liked to remove Sturt’s Folly, as he described it thus: ‘The only blot on the landscape is the nightmare tower of Horton, built for an observatory, and now happily falling into decay.’

In January 1947 the National Trust’s James Lees-Milne and Eardley Knollys went to look at the tower at the request of the Earl and Countess of Shaftesbury, who wished the charity to take on the care of the tower.  ‘Only a calcined beam or two’ was left of the interior, and concluding it was ‘rather ugly’, the pair concluded that it was ‘best not to accept it’.

The tower soon shrugged off this insult, and found a new role as a film star. In 1967 it featured in the film adaptation of Dorset boy Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Sergeant Troy (a rather dashing Terence Stamp) is filmed galloping away across the field with the tower as a dramatic backdrop. Hardy would have known the tower, as he lived in nearby Wimborne Minster for two years. In that period he wrote Two on a Tower, in which the protagonists fall in love as they watch the stars from the top of  ‘a tower in the form of a classical column’. Horton Tower has been suggested as a model, but scholars have found evidence in his papers that the ‘two real spots’, which inspired Hardy, were the tower at Charborough Park, and the monument to Admiral Hardy on Black Down, both in Dorset.

Hardy would have sympathised with the difficulty in establishing a correct history for Horton Tower, as he was aware that historians couldn’t always agree. In Two on a Tower he described the mount on which his fictional tower stands: ‘The fir-shrouded hill-top was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman Camp, – if it were not (as others insisted) an old English Castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field…’

Despite a grade II* listing in 1955, the tower continued to decay, and when it was described in the 1975 Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, it was as an empty shell.

In 1990 the tower was offered for sale, with the story being picked up by newspapers across the country (thanks to its lasting fame from the film role). An unexpected saviour appeared in 1991, when Vodafone was granted permission to use the tower as a transmission mast for mobile phone signal. As part of the deal the company consolidated the tower, and the conservation project was recognised with a Royal Town Planning Institute award in January 1995. The tower remains home to the transmitters, and is regularly upgraded.

The tower can be seen from miles around, but for a close-up try the adjacent public footpath.

View more of Christopher Gee’s work here https://christophergeepaintings.com

You can see John Piper’s mixed media view of the tower here https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/piper/horton-tower-dorset-1942-mixed-media/nomedium/asset/34203

You can see John Piper’s photographs of the tower here https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-8728-1-10-40/piper-photograph-of-horton-tower-in-dorset

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