Just over the river Ure from the market town of Masham is this unusual rotunda sitting on top of a rustic grotto. It was designed to take advantage of the view over the river to the church and the attractive little town. An engraved stone near the temple tells us that in 1770 ‘Samuel Wrather built this grotto’.

Samuel Wrather (1727-1806) was a wool-stapler of Masham. In 1773 he married Miss Spence, a ‘young lady of merit and fortune’, and he died in 1806 ‘at an advanced age universally respected’. He was succeeded by his son, Samuel junior (c.1778-1854), who is best known today as the owner of Nutwith, the champion racehorse bred by his late brother, which won the St Leger in 1843. The family had a small estate at Beggars Bush, in nearby Grewelthorpe, and also owned property in Masham town.

The early history of the Grotto Temple is unclear, and apart from the stone near the building there is little to go on. Late 18th century maps show that Samuel Wrather owned the strip of land now called Grotto Plantation, but the Grotto Temple itself is not marked.

The earliest image of the Grotto Temple found to date shows it as the property of Samuel Wrather junior. An engraving after a sketch by the artist George Cuitt (1779-1854), who moved to Masham in 1821, was made in 1837. It was published a year later in a fashionable pocket diary called Le Souvenir, or Pocket Tablet and captioned ‘Temple in the Grounds of S. Wrather, Masham’.

The 1st edition Ordnance Survey map, published in 1859, shows the structure as ‘Pavilion’, within woodland called ‘Grotto Plantation’. At that date there was no house nearby, suggesting that this was a detached pleasure ground (another unnamed building and bridges over a stream can be seen on the map), perhaps to be visited by the ferry which crossed the river not far away. There was certainly inspiration nearby: Hackfall, the famed woodland landscape with buildings created by William Aislabie of Studley in the 1750s and 60s, did not have a principal house attached and is only a short distance away.

A rare lithograph of the pavilion, of which only one copy has been traced, attests to its lost fame. It was published by C. M. Dydynski in around 1850 and was inserted into an extra-illustrated copy of Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s Richmondshire in the collection of Leeds Libraries. Extra-illustration, or Grangerisation, was a fashionable hobby in which prints and original sketches were interleaved into a text to enhance the content. The process took its name from the clergyman and print collector James Granger (1723-1776) who published a biographical history and encouraged readers to embellish it with engraved portraits of his subjects.

The Grotto Temple then featured on a number of picture postcards which were probably produced for the tourists who arrived after the opening of the branch line to Masham in 1875: visitors would have passed the grotto grounds on their way from the station to the town.

Sometime between 1890 and 1905, a house was built which took its name from the existing pleasure grounds: ‘The Grotto’. In the 1910s it was home to Arthur Atkinson, a haulage contractor, but by 1921 it had been renamed ‘The Greens’ and was home to the Burrill family. The engraved stone by the pavilion records that Edward Burrill restored the Grotto Temple in 1935, perhaps in preparation for the wedding of his daughter Lucy in 1936, when the reception was held at The Greens.

A fleeting mention of the ‘grotto in the plantation’ can be found in local novelist and writer Mary Elizabeth Stevenson’s guide to Masham, published in 1919. On Summer Roads in Mashamshire suggests rambles for the visitor to the area, including a walk from Masham town over the bridge towards the weir (since destroyed) to appreciate the views of the church from across the river.

Mrs Stevenson (1853-1935)  introduces the interesting idea that the grotto was a favoured viewpoint of the artist Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817), who settled in Masham in 1805. Stevenson wrote that Ibbetson painted ‘many fine views of the Church from this side [of the river]’, and this 1816 view certainly looks to have been taken from within the Grotto Plantation (Stevenson would have known the history of this painting, for it had hung above the fireplace in her childhood home overlooking the Market Place in Masham). The Ibbetson and Wrather families were friends, and in September 1813 they and a party of friends spent a day sketching before partaking of ‘tea and syllabub’ at Wrather’s Beggars Bush home.

Sadly the current condition gives great cause for concern: the pavilion’s pretty roof, with its wide overhanging eaves, has fallen and the grotto is overgrown. The structure is not listed and therefore has little protection, an omission that should be rectified urgently.

Grotto Plantation is private property and there is no public access, but the Grotto Temple can be seen through the trees from a public footpath.

Huge thanks to Alison Brayshaw and Gail Falkingham for their help in compiling the history of the Grotto Pavilion. There are still gaps in our knowledge – do get in touch if you can help.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the bottom of the page to share any thoughts or comments.

Clarkson’s History of Richmond, revised in 1821, recounts that Cuthbert Readshaw created a ‘highly romantic walk’ by the Swale in 1760. Cuthbert Readshaw, who died in 1773 was a merchant who lived in the Bailey (ie the market place) in Richmond, and according to his will he was in ‘the business of wine and spirits and other branches of trade’.

To access the walk 18th century visitors would have travelled downhill from the town centre and crossed the river via the Green Bridge. Promenading along the south bank of the River Swale they would have encountered the picturesque scene of leafy Billy Bank Wood (aka Bordel Bank) and occasional artful outbreaks of the craggy rock face behind. Tucked in the woods was the cleft or cave known as Arthur’s Oven, conjuring romantic images of ancient and wilder times.

Eventually visitors would reach the conical hill called Round Howe. This neat mound also excited the senses with many believing it to be the site of ancient druidic rituals ‘during the earliest periods of British history’. Others thought its origin owed more to geology, being ‘one of the most wonderful productions of nature’. In the 17th and 18th century the landscape was changed by both art and industry; alongside his picturesque riverside enhancements Readshaw, who had extensive mining interests, may have been one of the men working the hillside for copper.

Around the time he laid out the walk Readshaw also landscaped the Round Howe and built a temple on the summit ‘which with his pleasure-boat in the pool below, formed an agreeable contrast to the rude scenery of nature’. Jeffreys’ map published in 1775 shows the wooded hillside had 6 geometric paths leading to the top, with the summerhouse at the hub of the wheel. The temple was both eye-catcher from the town and viewpoint back to the to the panorama of the town, castle, river. The view also encompassed the Yorke seat The Green, on the opposite bank, topped with the the elegant and prominent Culloden Tower of c.1746 (now Landmark Trust). It is not clear if Readshaw was creating the landscape for his own personal use, or if it was a commercial venture like the London pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

The agricultural commentator Arthur Young visited Richmond in the late 1760s and described ‘a little temple… at a distance in the vale, romantically situated among hanging woods’ which added ‘much to the scene’. This view (above) by George Cuit seems to be the only pictorial record, and shows it was a classical rotunda with Corinthian columns, garlanded frieze and a shallow domed roof reminiscent of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

Curiously, although Richmond was visited by many tourists in the later decades of the 18th century, Young’s is the only contemporary account of the temple known to survive, probably because the structure had only a brief existence. A visitor in 1779 described the ‘picturesque hill’ across the river from the Mr Yorke’s house The Greens, but makes no mention of a temple, and a 1791 engraving of the scene shows that the hilltop is bare. Was it poorly built and soon collapsed? Was it an ephemeral structure, never intended to have a long life?  Did Readshaw’s lease of the land expire? No explanation has been found; please comment below if you can help.

A further complication is added by the difficulty in separating the inter-connected Readshaw families living in Richmond in the late 18th century – all of who seem to have been called Caleb or Cuthbert. In 1768 Arthur Young said the little temple belonged to ‘Mr Ritchie’ and this was corrected to ‘Mr Readshaw in the 2nd edition of his Six Months Tour through the North of England, published in 1771. Young doesn’t give a first name, and it is not until Clarkson’s heavily revised edition of the History of 1821 that the name Cuthbert Readshaw is used. By this date the temple was gone, and Clarkson was clearly relying on hearsay as he erroneously described the former building as ‘chinese’. So was Cuthbert Readshaw the builder, or could it have been Caleb Readshaw of The Grove, another prominent Richmond citizen of the time? Another mystery to be solved.

The Round Howe and Billy Bank Wood are in the care of the National Trust. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hudswell-woods

NB this post was revised on 1 December and Jane Hatcher, Richmond historian, is thanked for her help.