A prominent feature in the extensive demesne of Alnwick Castle is the Observatory on Ratcheugh Crag, a ‘stupendous and romantic rock’. The building was one of a number of landscape features planned by Hugh and Elizabeth, 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, in the 1770s, but the sham-ruined eye-catcher was not completed until after her death.

Ratcheugh Crag is an outcrop of basalt, and a watercolour in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland, dated to the mid 1770s, shows it bare. The crag, which is visible from Alnwick Castle, was a popular destination for an excursion, and in 1773 the Duke and Duchess noted their decision to build ‘A Ruin at Radsheugh’, and to lay out a new road along the rocky escarpment. The Duchess died in 1776, which may have put plans on hold, but a visitor in autumn 1782 noted an ‘unfinish’d building above the rock’, and this became the pavilion that stands today.

As work continued to complete this folly, the Duke, or rather the architect Robert Adam, went back to the drawing board and in 1783-84 a series of magnificent designs for a greatly extended symmetrical range ‘proposed to be erected upon the top of a Rock near Alnwick Castle’ were executed. A number are in the Sir John Soane museum, and at Alnwick there are wonderful highly-finished designs for a range in a castellated style (below) and an alternative in an ecclesiastical manner.

But these grand plans were never executed. At Alnwick there is a drawing of Ratcheugh by John Lambert which is annotated with the words ‘drawn from Mr Bell’s original design’. John Bell was the Duke’s mason and builder, and had accompanied the late Duchess on tour, sketching the buildings she admired. This wording suggests that it was Bell’s design that was under construction in 1782, and complete by 1784 when Adam noted on one of his plans (above) that ‘the part shaded light already executed by the Duke’.

The Duke had a new drive laid to the crag to enable visitors to arrive in comfort, and in 1785 the Duke took a guest to admire the ‘building imitating the Ruins of an Old Castle’. The upper room was glazed on all sides, and from it Alnwick could ‘be viewed to great advantage’. The panorama also took in the Cheviot Hills and the North Sea.

The Duke died in 1786 and early the next century his son added an extension to the the ruin (not illustrated) to provide a home for the Keeper, which became known as Crag Cottage. The 1844 tithe map calls the hilltop folly the ‘Ratcheugh Tower’ and by the time of the first Ordnance Survey map of 1867 (surveyed 1861-4) it is marked as ‘Observatory’. The surveyors noted it as a ‘Mock Ruin of which the Observatory forms the Apex’, adding perceptively that it had been ‘erected about a century ago to add to the effect of the naturally beautiful landscape’.

The Crag was celebrated in a very curious poem by John Scafe, an Alnwick-based poet and geologist. In 1820 he combined his interests to write King Coal’s Levee, or Geological etiquette, a versified study of stone, which Goethe described as containing ‘all the knowledge of Geology a man wants’.

Thence to Ratcheugh Crag he pac’d:
– A little wilderness of taste
Dropt on the fertile lands,
And still, by ducal visits graced,
The hoary summit stands.

Northumberland Estates has restored the building, and it continues to be used by the Percy family. There is no public access, but there are occasional open days for local charities, and Ratcheugh Crag and its folly can be admired from public rights of way and the road.

For some stunning drone photos of the observatory, and a short film, visit https://fabulousnorth.com/place/view/ratcheugh-observatory/

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In the first half of the 19th century the Airmyn estate, on a bend in the river Aire, was owned by George Percy, the 2nd earl of Beverley (1778-1867), a grandson of the 1st duke of Northumberland. He was admired as a benevolent landlord who took care of his tenants, and in 1834 he endowed the village with a Sunday School. In the mid 1860s the tenants ‘unanimously decided to erect a testimonial’ in honour of his ‘kindness and liberality’. This tribute took the form of a charming clocktower, far from folly, but an ornament to this tranquil and very pretty riverside village.

A public subscription raised £700, and the architect Henry Francis Lockwood (1811-1878) was commissioned to design the tower. The committee probably knew Lockwood’s work in nearby Hull, where he was based in the 1840s, but by the time the tower was erected he had entered into partnership with William Mawson in Bradford. The pair would later achieve fame as the architects of such great Victorian works as Bradford Town Hall and the model village of Saltaire in Yorkshire, designed for Sir Titus Salt.

In February 1865 the earl of Beverley succeeded his cousin to the dukedom of Northumberland. The committee must have decided to keep the tower as a memorial to the earl of Beverley, as he had been titled throughout his ownership of the Airmyn estate, so the tower bears the legend ‘GEORGE EARL OF BEVERLEY 1865’. When the foundation stone was laid on ‘a very gloomy day’ in October 1866, the new duke was in his late eighties and unable to attend the ceremony. He was represented by his nephew, Algernon Charles Heber Percy, who had by then taken control of the Airmyn estate. Heber Percy placed a time capsule within the masonry containing a copy of the Eastern Morning News (Hull’s first daily newspaper), some coins, and a parchment detailing the genesis of the memorial tower. He then laid the foundation stone and read a letter from his uncle thanking his former tenants for their kind remembrance of him. The Goole Volunteer Rifle Band played, and everyone sat down to a celebratory tea. The duke however probably never saw his memorial tower, for he died in August 1867, aged 89.

The Airmyn estate was broken up in an estate sale in 1919, but the Heber Percy family (whose principal seat is Hodnet Hall, Shropshire) retained ownership of the land on which the tower stands until 1951, when it was gifted to the Rural District Council of Goole. Airmyn is a very attractive village of red-brick houses, and the tower and the adjoining school built by the earl make a very handsome pair.

The river Aire is wide and fast as it flows through Airmyn to join the Ouse, which then meets the Humber to flow out to sea, and there are lovely walks along its banks. Airmyn proved to be a most  delightful discovery.

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Brizlee Tower* stands high on Brizlee Hill, near Alnwick, and overlooks Hulne Park, a detached pleasure ground close to the Duke of Northumberland’s principal park at Alnwick Castle. It was built in the late 18th century as a prospect tower and eye-catcher, and also as an object to be visited on a drive from the castle through Hulne Park.

The park was designed by ‘the inimitable Brown’, aka Capability, working with local engineers and designers, and was also home to the ruins of mediaeval Hulne Abbey, embellished and repurposed by the Duke and Duchess as a banqueting house, pleasure garden and menagerie for exotic pheasants. This is one of The Folly Flâneuse’s favourite follies: the detail is just so joyful, or as historian Alistair Rowan so wonderfully put it: ‘at Brizlee there is fantasy and flamboyance’.

Brizlee Hill had been landscaped in the previous decades, and there were already plantations and a network of rides. A tower had been planned for the hill during the Duchess’s lifetime, but she died in 1776 before building had started, and it was left to her husband to erect it in her memory. Many early accounts of the 87 feet high tower are at pains to stress that the tower was ‘planned entirely’ by Hugh 1st Duke of Northumberland (1714-1786) . But whilst the location and the Gothick style were probably his choice, he did have just a little help with the detail from his friend Robert Adam. Adam’s drawings for the tower, prepared in 1777 and 1778, survive in the collections at Alnwick Castle and the Soane Museum, London.

Although the tower carries the date 1781, the ‘celebrated Tower at Brizlee’ wasn’t completely finished until 1783. The exterior is decorated with carved stones showing the Duke’s Order of the Garter, 12 coats of arms representing the couple’s lineage, and at first floor level two Coade Stone roundels showing the profiles of the Duke and Duchess. The finishing touch was ‘a curious grate on which a bonfire is kindled on extra-ordinary occasions’. This ironwork basket was made by industrialist James Sharp at his factory: Sharp grew up at the rectory in nearby Rothbury, where his brothers included the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp.

Visible from the first floor platform is a plaque inscribed:

Circumspice
Ego omnia ista sum Dimensus;
Mei sunt ordines,
mea Descriptio:
Multae etiam istarum arborum.
Mea manu sunt satae

(Look around. I have measured out all these things; they are my orders, it is my planting; many of these trees have even been planted by my hand).

The inscription begins circumspice which roughly translates as ‘look around’; the Latin word was most famously used in Sir Christopher Wren’s monument in St Paul’s Cathedral. His epitaph reads si monumentum requiris, circumspice: (if you seek (his) monument, look around), which instruction guided the reader to look up at the beauties of the cathedral, Wren’s great achievement. The Duke was surely echoing this when asking visitors to gaze out upon the castle, pleasure ground, and productive farmland he had improved or implemented at Alnwick. The second part of the inscription is from the ancient Greek account of Lysander meeting Cyrus, the King of Persia. The words are Cyrus’s response to Lysander’s admiration of his gardens.

Most early visitors waxed lyrical about the Duke’s work, with one describing it as ‘well-imagined and in an excellent Taste of Gothick Solidity’ and another writing that the ‘elegant and lofty Belvidere […] will ever remain a noble specimen of his skill in Architecture’. One less generous tourist agreed the tower was elegant, but thought the inscription savoured ‘too much of vanity’.

From the top of the tower the view was bounded by the North Sea in one direction, and the Cheviot Hills in another. Looking south-east the mid-ground was dominated by a stunning view of Alnwick Castle and its park, with the River Aln running through. This is best illustrated in Girtin’s view from Brizlee of c.1800 and in a verse from one of the pastoral poems so beloved of the Victorians. Composed by John Lamb Luckley of Alnwick, and published in 1848, ‘Beautiful Brizlee’ extols the wonders of the spot:

Here Warkworth rears her ancient towers
Above the winding dale;
There Cheviot’s frowning summit lours
Far o’er the cultivated vale;
Hulner with her ruin’d altars lies
Beneath the mountain tree;
And varied views delight the eyes
From beautiful Brizlee.

By 1999 there were severe problems of water penetration and rusting ironwork which had left the slender stone balustrades unsafe and a range of other problems, which put the tower ‘at risk’. The Northumberland Estates commissioned specialist conservation architects Robin Kent Architecture & Conservation to carry out repairs with grant aid from English Heritage. After thorough investigations work started in January 2004 and the grade I listed tower was reopened by the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland on 21 November 2005.

The tower can be seen from walks in Hulne Park, and there are occasional charity open days, but there is no vehicular access. At the time of writing the park is closed due to the COVID19 pandemic, but in due course will reopen and you can find out more here http://www.northumberlandestates.co.uk/the-estate/walks-trails/

* aka Brislee, Brisley, Brislay, Briesley, Brislaw…

Note: The Folly Flâneuse is continuing to Stay Home. Special thanks to all those who have helped with images and expertise so these posts may continue to appear. This week particular thanks to Robin Kent.