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

Follies Can Be Fun

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.