In 1922 the writer and illustrator Charles George Harper penned a series of three articles about follies for The Architect magazine. Harper was a prolific author and had noted many follies as he toured the nation, often including them in his books on the topography of Britain. The articles were illustrated with his own vignettes of some of the buildings he admired (or censured). As for the foibles, which some may find a rather weak description of the eccentricities of Harper’s character, read on…

As ever in a feature on follies, the author had to deal with the question of a definition. Harper (1863-1943) concluded that a folly was a ‘pleasant fancy’ in the shape of a garden-house, a gazebo or perhaps even a ‘skyline freak’. As he continued, ‘now we have settled the nature of follies, the next thing will be to find some’. This, he thought, would be far from difficult, as the ‘land abounds with them’. Harper was sure that once a folly had been found, ‘the traveller who happens to be of a speculative turn of mind will find his curiosity greatly piqued to learn the story’.

Harper began with the building which he thought was ‘architecturally the most interesting’: the Triangular Lodge at Rushton in Northamptonshire. This was, he wrote, a building in which ‘Sir Thomas Tresham gave full outlet to his peculiar bent of mind’ by building a structure in which all measurements and decorations were governed by the ‘mystic three’.

In Cornwall Harper visited a ‘prime curiosity of the gruesome kind’ in the form of the mausoleum of Sir James Tillie. The monument was then derelict, but peering through a small gap the statue of Tillie could be seen – a ‘ferociously ugly man, with scowling countenance and great protruding paunch.’

Jack Fuller of Sussex (best known as Mad Jack Fuller) was described as ‘one of those squires who could not leave a hill-top alone in its natural beauty, but must needs place on it something in the way of a building, generally something ugly’. This was illustrated with a view of the Sugarloaf, supposedly erected to help Fuller win a bet that he could see Dallington church spire from his home. In fact he couldn’t, and the story goes that the cone was erected in a great hurry to ensure he won the wager.

William Beckford was noted as a man who frittered a fortune building towers, and an elegant sketch of his surviving tower in Bath was included in the article.

Harper was known for his strong opinions, and wasn’t afraid to air them in print. An anonymous review of his The Marches of Wales in The Athenaeum in 1895 noted how he went into ‘rhapsodies on discovering a Conservative cobbler’ but ‘shrieks against Dissenters, teetotallers and Radical politicians’. He was also accused of passing a ‘somewhat unjust judgment on the character of the Welsh people’.

To this list of pet hates might be added the women who were (to his mind) threatening the established order. In particular, Harper was no fan of the increasing numbers of female journalists who had ‘invaded newspaper offices’ and who were all more interested in the ‘cut of a dress’ than the ‘fall of a statesman from office’. He makes this sweeping statement in 1894, in a book that was a curious departure from his usual travelogues: Revolted Women: Past, Present and to Come. After what Harper called Eve’s ‘stupendous faux pas‘, he wondered why womanhood wasn’t content to ‘sit, for all time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot’ instead of aspiring to rule men while they had ‘no efficient control over [their] own hysterical being’.

But back to follies…

Harper also noted that not everything called a folly was actually a built structure with an interesting history. As an example, he gave the hilltop clump of trees in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) which had long been known as Faringdon Folly. One wonders what he made of the tower that Lord Berners erected on the summit only a decade or so later: no doubt it would have fallen into the ‘skyline freak’ category.

All of the follies mentioned are publicly accessible. Most have been covered in these pages – the search function will take you to the relevant posts.

Assuming she can control her own emotions (Harper didn’t think this possible of any females, especially writers) the Flâneuse will be back with another folly story next week. Thank you for reading.

On a prominent hill above the town of Faringdon in Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire) the ornate top of a tower peeps out above the trees. Faringdon Tower, often known as Lord Berners’ Folly, was built in 1935, but its site had been known as Faringdon Folly for generations.

Although the word folly is best recognised as meaning a foolish act, or in these pages as a quirky piece of architecture, it can also mean a leafy hilltop. Such is the case in Faringdon where the clump of trees atop Faringdon Hill has been known as The Folly for centuries. The hill, once home to a fortification marked on the 1898 Ordnance Survey map as ‘Cromwell’s Battery’, was part of the Faringdon estate, home in 1787 to then then poet laureate Henry James Pye (1745-1813). In that year Pye published his Poems on Various Subjects, in which the hill which is described as ‘a noted landmark’ and celebrated in a long (and rather dreary, so you have been spared) poem.

In 1918 the Faringdon estate was inherited by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), and in 1934 he decided that the arboreal folly should be home to one of the bricks and mortar variety. Some locals were in favour of this ‘admirable endeavour’, believing an Englishman’s home was his castle, and that Berners should be free to build whatever he chose on his land. Others were less than keen, and the town was said to be ‘hot and bothered’ about the plan. A Miss Lobb was convinced that Berners was going to install a siren and a searchlight on the top of the tower, and was concerned this was would disturb the sick and the infirm. This was never part of Lord Berners’s plan for the tower, but his friend Nancy Mitford’s satirised the idea in The Pursuit of Love, in which Lord Merlin is a thinly disguised Berners:

‘A marble folly on a nearby hill was topped with a gold angel which blew a trumpet every evening at the hour of Lord Merlin’s birth […] The folly glittered by day with semi-precious stones, by night a powerful blue beam was trained upon it’.

In a sop to his opponents Berners modified the design so that the tower was only 5 feet above the trees, but Faringdon Rural District Council, acting on the advice of the North Berks Regional Planning Committee, still vetoed the plans, citing their powers under the Town & Country Planning Act. Berners appealed, and an investigation was launched by the Ministry of Health (this government department being, as John Betjeman pointed out, ‘for some mysterious reason the arbiter of public taste in such matters’).

Eventually, in October 1934, the local paper could announce that Lord Berners was ‘to have his way’ after the Ministry granted the appeal (having been given a good lunch at Faringdon House). Work was scheduled to begin in spring 1935, using estate labour augmented by local men, and giving around 6 months of employment. The architect was Lord Gerald Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, a friend of Berners.

Edward Thurlow Leeds, the Keeper of Oxford’s prestigious Ashmolean Museum was asked to examine the site after human skeletons were discovered as the foundations were laid. In May 1935 he summarised his findings for the local paper: ‘a Castle existed on the Faringdon Folly some eight hundred years ago, and […] the skeletons found there are probably those of men killed during King Stephen’s successful attack on it’. The paper was pleased to report that ‘however varied may be the views on the tower […] there is undivided interest in the conclusions which have been reached by the prominent archaeologist’.

Berners was in Europe as the tower went up, and the story goes that he arrived home to find the austere classical shaft not to his taste. He immediately gave orders that the octagonal uppermost storey be flamboyantly gothic in style.

On Guy Fawke’s Night 1935 Berners threw a ‘Tower Warming Party’, with a host of glamorous guests. The evening also marked the birthday of his companion, Robert ‘Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy (1911-1987), and Berners gifted him the tower. Heber-Percy later recalled he had been hoping for a horse.

The opening ceremony concluded with fireworks which were appreciated by the whole town, and local children wrote excitedly of the display to ‘Uncle Ted’, who edited the childrens’ page of the North Wilts Herald. The more athletic local children might have made it to the top of the new tower at the carnival in Faringdon Park in August 1936: ‘Energetic entrants’ had to race from Faringdon House to the room at the top of the tower and back, with the winner apparently covering the distance in under 12 minutes. The journalist covering the fete was impressed – it apparently took him ten minutes just to climb up the tower.

The tower had already found fame as a result of the press coverage of the ups and downs of the planning process, but it became more widely known after it appeared on Britain’s roads. In 1936 the year-old tower joined the list of more venerable follies which appeared in the Shell petrol advertising campaign ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’. 27 artists were asked to create a work featuring a folly, and these paintings were reproduced as posters which were pasted onto the lorries delivering oil and petrol. Berners painted his new tower, which by 1937 was already known as ‘Faringdon’s Famous Folly’.

Much has been written of the eccentricities of Berners – he dyed the feathers of doves in rainbow hues making his lawn ‘exotically gay’, and entertained Penelope Betjeman and her horse to afternoon tea, etc., etc.. But when not occupied with these larks, he was a talented artist and an accomplished composer and writer. His epitaph recognised his many talents, and a life well-lived, concluding ‘But, praise the Lord, he seldom was bored’.

The market town of Faringdon is very proud of its local eccentric, and tributes include coloured doves perched on a windowsill, and this wonderful stone bench which remembers Salvador Dali’s visit to Faringdon House. On that occasion the artist walked through the town wearing the diving suit which had been hired ready for his appearance at an exhibition of Surrealist art. The full text on the bench is a quote from Berners: ‘Mistrust a man who never has an occasional flash of silliness’.

The press coverage of the controversial tower might have inspired a story by the prolific writer of ‘rattling good stories of school life’, R.A.H. Goodyear. It is surely not coincidence that a novel featuring a dispute over a folly tower was published in 1936, just after Faringdon Tower hit the headlines?

The School’s Airmen is set in a Yorkshire public school, and tells how the boys attempt to thwart the village shopkeeper’s plan to erect a ‘monstrous edifice’ on a nearby hill. Every time Mr Puncheon has stone carted up to the site, the boys hire a lorry and tip the stone into a stream, or steal the workmen’s tools and hack away the foundations, whilst the masters turn a blind eye. The builders (‘bone idle slackers’) try  to defend Puncheon, just as Lord Berners’s supporters had done, saying ‘who is to stop a man building anything he likes on his own land!’. Despite the efforts of the schoolboys, the tower, quickly dubbed Old Punch’s Folly, ‘rose steadily skywards’.

The dramatic denouement sees puny young Aimard, one of the few boys who finds favour with the shopkeeper, fall from the scaffolding around the tower. A schoolboy airman is despatched to Ireland in one of the school’s planes (in poor visibility for added drama) to pick up the badly-injured boy’s parents. In true movie fashion the anxious schoolboys assemble in the quad to await his return, until at last the plane emerges from the gloom to make a textbook landing. Aimard makes a slow but sure recovery and Puncheon declares the tower will be taken down, and instead spends the money on two prizes to be awarded annually by the school.

Perhaps if Old Punch’s Folly had been completed (and had not been fictional) it would eventually have become, like Faringdon Tower, a popular local landmark. Robert Heber-Percy later recalled that the locals had completely forgotten that they ever disliked it.

Whilst the flâneurs of 19th century Paris might have been content to stroll the boulevards, with an occasional exertion to reach the height of Montmartre, this Flâneuse suffers for her art, forever ascending eminences in search of follies.

And if the hill is topped with a lofty tower then there is more work to be done. But there are rewards…

Heber-Percy, gave the tower to the Faringdon Folly Tower Trust, ‘to ensure that the public have use of, and enjoyment of, the tower and its surroundings’. It was listed at grade II in 1986, when just over half a century old. It is now open regularly, and you can learn more here https://www.faringdonfolly.org.uk

UPDATE October 2022. Researching the folly tower at Woodhouse Grove School in Yorkshire the Folly Flâneuse discovered that Goodyear was a pupil, and would also have been influence by the late 18th century tower in the school grounds. Read more https://thefollyflaneuse.com/elams-tower-woodhouse-grove-apperley-bridge-west-yorkshire/

Comments are always welcome – please scroll to the foot of the page to share any thoughts or information. Thank you for reading.

‘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.

The sub-heading ‘Hurt by a Mosquito’ was initially perplexing, until it was revealed that the Mosquito in question was an aircraft, and the hurt was inflicted on King Alfred’s Tower. The tall tower stands on the Stourhead estate (most of which is in Wiltshire, but the folly is just over the border into Somerset) and was built between 1762 and 1772 by Henry Hoare. A plane hit the tower in 1944, sadly with the loss of lives, although historians now dispute that the aircraft was a Mosquito. When the article was published the tower was closed to the public, but it is now restored to excellent condition and the tower can be climbed on open days.

Moving into Devon, the next folly to be discussed was Bishop Copleston’s Tower in Offwell, which is said to have been built in the mid 19th century to alleviate employment and to give the bishop a view across the Bristol Channel to his Welsh diocese. If the latter, the author noted drily, ‘there was a serious misjudgment about the height of the intervening hills’. He also left the reader to decide if the tower was best described as of ‘Italianate’ or ‘Victorian factory’ character (and one senses that neither was intended to be complimentary), although as the article was not illustrated it’s not clear how one would reach a conclusion. Ever happy to oblige, the Folly Flâneuse dropped by to take a photograph:

Clearly familiar with the follies of the South West, the author then succinctly described the prospect towers at Horton in Dorset (‘lonely in a field’), the Haldon Belvedere in Devon (‘high and eminent’), Beckford’s Tower in Bath (a ‘fantasy’), and poor old Cranmore Tower in Somerset (‘better to have been left as a distant tantalizing mystery than inspected’).

A move east into Hampshire brought the author to Luttrell’s Tower at Eaglehurst: ‘a fascinating example of an elegant habitable tower’. Built by Temple Simon Luttrell in the late 18th century, the tower remains both elegant and habitable thanks to the Landmark Trust, the charity which restored the folly as a holiday home.

Favoured columns were also largely in the South West of England, and particular mention was made of that at Burton Pynsent in Somerset. In 1959 the column was ‘permanently closed’ after a curious cow attempted the ascent and got stuck. It has since been restored, and there are occasional special openings when the column can be climbed.

Bringing the history of folly towers up to date, the writer visited the tower built by Lord Berners at Faringdon, then in Berkshire but now in Oxfordshire. Lord Berners’s folly was then only a little more than 20 years old, but, alas, it was found to be ‘locked against all comers’. Happily, the door is now regularly opened to visitors.

The article ends with the author pondering why owners of great estates were no longer building follies. Surely, he thought, a contemporary folly might ‘be erected as a popular attraction’. And in case any impoverished stately home owners are reading, and tutting to themselves about the potential costs, fear not, our writer has that covered: ‘And why not get the public to build it, by paying sixpence a brick for the privilege’.

So, more than 60 years later, the good news is that all of the buildings featured survive. Although only four were listed buildings when the article was written (including Luttrell’s Tower which was listed the day before the article appeared in print), each tower and column mentioned here is today protected by listed building status. And the article’s author, who bemoaned the lack of access to many of the follies, would be delighted to know that the vast majority are now open to visitors: the tower at Offwell is part of a private house, but is visible from the road, and all of the other follies can be visited or viewed at close range from a public footpath.

*Based on the close similarity to a Country Life article on ‘Tower Follies of the South’, published in June 1960, the Folly Flâneuse suspects the author was J.D.U. Ward, a writer, photographer and forestry expert.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts are more than welcome – there’s a comments box at the foot of the page.