Tag: Cranmore Tower

architecture, belvedere, Column, Folly, garden history, landscape, Tower

Follies Can Be Fun

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Cranmore Tower, c.1920. Postcard reproduced courtesy of the Dave Martin Collection.

‘Follies Can Be Fun’. So read the headline of an article in the Times in October 1959. But apparently not all follies: the anonymous author* dismissed sham ruins, grottoes and shell rooms, and expressed a preference for towers and columns. The Folly Flâneuse, who wholeheartedly agrees with the headline, thought it might be ‘fun’ to revisit some of the follies featured in the piece, to see how they had fared more than 60 years later.

architecture, belvedere, Column, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, Observatory, Somerset, Tower

Turner’s Tower, Faulkland, Somerset

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Somerset has more than its fair share of folly towers, but one of the most audacious examples is sadly long gone. This was the slender tower built by John Turner in the hamlet of Faulkland, near Bath, in 1890. It stood for less than 80 years, having become progressively shorter before its eventual demise in the 1960s.