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

Thanks for reading. Comments and thoughts are very welcome, please scroll down to the bottom of the page to get in touch.

Born 200 years ago this month, on 8 February 1819, John Ruskin was a polymath; an artist, writer and critic who believed that culture should be available to all, not just the elite. As a new exhibition in London beautifully illustrates, Ruskin had strong opinions on most subjects. As he thought the architecture of Palladio ‘virtueless and despicable’, and the Houses of Parliament ‘effeminate and effortless’, we can probably assume that garden ornaments such as classical temples and gothic towers would not be his ‘thing’.

As a precocious child, however, one caught his attention:

Belle-view is a summer house on a crag high above Windermere. It was constructed in the last years of the 18th century as a picnic spot and belvedere on an outcrop of rock that was already established as one of the key viewing points, or stations, around the lake. From its high vantage point there were views up and down the whole length of the lake, and clambering up the slope produced that frisson of fear beloved of early tourists. Designed by John Carr of York, it became one of the essential sights on a tour of the Cumberland and Westmorland lakes – although until the 1960s county boundary changes it was actually in Lancashire.

In the first years of the 19th century Belle-view passed into the ownership of John Christian Curwen of Belle Isle, the largest island on Windermere. His quirky round mansion, likened to a tea canister, was another ‘must see’ and visitors were allowed to land and see the pleasure grounds which covered the island. Curwen extended the summer house, which was an eye-catcher from his island home, and decorated the upper room with prints of picturesque scenes and windows edged with coloured glass (downstairs was a parlour and apartments for servants). The Station, as it now became known, was used for picnic excursions and as a grandstand for watching regattas held on the lake.

Ruskin visited the Lakes on a number of occasions en route to his father’s homeland of Scotland. In 1830, aged 11, he described The Station in his diary, recording its distinctive glazing:

‘It is a large tower in which is a large apartment with various painted windows. The people tell you that on looking through the light blue it represents the appearance of winter. The green represents spring the yellow summer the purple a thunderstorm and the orange autumn. Each window of this place presented a different prospect of the lake and all were equally beautiful.’

High-minded as he was, the boy was not above being moved by a dog of ‘very wise and venerable appearance […] we all gave him a pat which he was graciously pleased to acknowledge with a wag of his tail.’

The London exhibition John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing at Two Temple Place on the Thames, next to Middle Temple was held in 2019. Writing in the Financial Times art-critic Jackie Wullschläger described the building as a folly. Whilst perhaps stretching the definition, Two Temple Place is certainly an unusual structure. It was built in the early 1890s as an estate office for the super-rich American William Waldorf Astor, and was designed by John Loughborough Pearson in a wonderfully ornate style which is impossible to categorise. Betjeman thought it ‘a little masterpiece’ and Pevsner a ‘perfect gem’. What is very clear, inside and out, is that Astor’s architect acted according to instructions and built ‘a perfect building irrespective of cost’.

The Station, sadly ruinous and with the original painted windows long gone, is now in the care of the National Trust who have consolidated the structure. The trust has built a viewing platform on the first floor and is clearing the slopes to reopen the views and allow visitors to understand how the building was designed to function. Coloured glass has recently been reintroduced as shown above https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/claife-viewing-station-and-windermere-west-shore