Sir Richard Worsley inherited his father’s baronetcy, and the Appuldurcombe estate on the Isle of Wight, in 1768. The following year set off on the Grand Tour, and on his return in 1770 he turned his attention to remodelling the house and park. In the next few years he erected two eye-catchers to be seen from the mansion: an obelisk and a dramatic hilltop sham ruin called Cook’s Castle.

The origin of the name Cook’s Castle is uncertain, but it is named as such on a 1773 estate plan. In the eighteenth century there was no good road to the folly, and in 1793 Henry Penruddocke Wyndham was frustrated by the effort that was required to reach the ruins. He concluded that the sham castle did not ‘deserve such exertions’, as the building was too ‘regular’, that is it was too neat to be a genuine ruin. His mistake seems to have been to view the folly at close quarters: Sir Richard Worsley (1751-1805) himself described the sham in his History of the Isle of Wight, published in 1781, and makes it clear that the ‘ruin of an ancient castle’ was intended as ‘a point of view from the house’. Maps from the middle of the nineteenth century also show it as a series of three towers connected by a curtain wall, but as an engraving from the same period illustrates, the central tower had by then collapsed.

Visitors who looked to the folly from the mansion were impressed, and even the oft-critical commentator on landscape Revd William Gilpin found much to praise. He described Appuldurcombe House as ‘magnificent’, and thought the grounds equally impressive. Cook’s Castle was, he wrote, ‘well executed and […] well placed’. A traveller in 1798 noted the ‘modern ruin’, and thought it had a ‘better effect from the house than is usual for such buildings to have’.

A century later, with improved roads and the coming of the railway, Cook’s Castle and its ‘picturesque grounds’ had become a favourite picnic spot for excursionists and society outings. Few were fooled by the supposed ancient ruin, and John Gwilliam expressed his feelings in verse in 1845:

There was of course a downside to the popularity of the spot, which was featured in countless guidebooks, and by 1887 there were concerns that the folly was being damaged by vandals. The sham ruin quickly became a genuine one, and by the middle of the twentieth century there was nothing at all to be seen. Only a stone now marks the approximate spot where Cook’s Castle once stood.

Sir Richard also erected a ‘Cornish granite obelisk, near seventy feet high’ to the memory of Sir Robert Worsley 4th bart, who died in 1747 (the fourth baronet died without issue and the Appuldurcombe estate was left to a cousin who was Sir Richard’s grandfather). Built on a ‘bare down’, the obelisk was completed in 1774 and commemorated Sir Robert’s ‘long and exemplary life’, and Sir Richard’s gratitude that he had succeeded to the estate.

The monument was visible from miles around, but this exposed spot made it vulnerable to the elements. Having been repaired after a lightning strike in 1831, it was ‘blown down’ in a gale in December 1836.

The lower stages of the obelisk were restored in 1983, resulting in a stubby little monument, which is no longer a great landmark and eye-catcher…

The only major landscape ornament to survive at Appuldurcombe today is the elegant Freemantle Gate (grade II*), described in c.1779 as a ‘handsome Gateway of the Ionic Order’.

It is not clear who designed the obelisk and folly castle, but the antiquarian Sir Richard is likely to have played a part. A possible candidate is William Donn, who worked for Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown before setting up on his own: he was paid almost £4,000 for work at Appuldurcombe between 1774 and 1782. Donn was crossing to the Isle of Wight in 1777 and chatted to a fellow traveller. The tourist noted in his journal that Donn was working for Sir Richard, and described him as being ’employed in undertaking to build Houses and to lay out Gardens for Gentlemen’ (thanks to the Garden Historian for this brilliant reference).

Capability Brown himself did visit Appuldurcombe in October 1779, and sent a plan for improvements the following summer. Sadly Sir Richard’s accounts of work on the house and park are not known to survive, so many questions about who did what, and when, remain unanswered, but the sham castle and obelisk pre-date Brown’s plan.

Appuldurcombe House (grade I) is in the care of English Heritage and can be visited in the summer season. It was a roofless shell for many years but has been partially restored as a wedding venue. There’s more here.

There is a comments box at the foot of the page and your thoughts are always welcome. Thanks for reading.

Close to the little town of Ryde on the north coast of the Isle of Wight stood Appley Towers, a fine seaside villa with views across the Solent to the mainland of Britain. In the later decades of the nineteenth century its new owner added a belvedere on the shore, which he called the Watch Tower.

In 1872 the Appley Towers (sometimes Apley Towers) estate was up for sale, and there was much gossip about who might purchase it. The Hampshire Advertiser suggested in June of that year that the Marquess of Bute had snapped up the estate for £47,000, but in July papers across the country reported that a ‘well-known member of Parliament’ had purchased the ‘magnificent estate’ for £59,950. This was Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), MP for Gateshead since 1841, and knighted in 1865 after serving as Paymaster General and Vice-President of the Board of Trade.

Immediately after purchasing the estate Sir William began to remodel the house and fill the gardens and glasshouses with the finest botanical specimens (soon to be described in all of the smart gardening journals of the period). He built a private pier where his visitors could arrive by yacht, and he contributed handsomely to the costs of building a ‘massive sea wall’ below his estate with a promenade open to all. By the time of his death in 1882 he was rumoured to have spent £70,000 in ‘beautifying the place’.

In this same period he erected a pretty little ‘Watch Tower’ on the sea wall. Sir William commissioned local men to design and build the tower, which was complete by 1876. Over the door is a plaque carved with Hutt’s family crest of a lapwing and the motto Vouloir est Pouvoir – which can be translated as ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. Although Sir William called it the Watch Tower, it quickly became known locally as the Appley Tower.

The architect was Thomas Hellyer and the builder was Isaac Barton, both of Ryde. Hellyer and Barton also worked on remodelling the main house, Appley Towers, including adding the lofty clock tower which, with the Watch Tower, made ‘such a conspicuous figure in the landscape as viewed from the sea’.

After Sir William’s death in 1882 there was speculation that the Prince of Wales was going to buy Appley Towers, but this was soon dismissed as ‘a flim-flam of the wildest kind’. The Hutt family continued to own Appley Towers until 1912, when the property with its ‘View Tower’ was sold to Sir Hedworth Williamson 9th Bt, a wealthy industrialist who entertained members of the royal family at Appley Towers on a number of occasions in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1945 Ryde Borough Council bought the estate with a view to creating a public park, and in the following decade the house was demolished and its site developed for housing. The ‘pudgy little Appley Tower’ (as described by Gwyn Headley in Country Life in 1993) was restored in 2023-2024 in a project led by Natural Enterprise. The tower is now to be open regularly (although reliant on volunteers, and the Flâneuse found it shut, so check before visiting). The area of the former gardens nearest the sea is now a public park.

The tower is listed by Historic England at grade II for its ‘curiosity value’, and so in keeping with such whimsy, and with apologies to Edward Lear…

There was an old gentleman of Ryde,
Whose estate was his joy and his pride.
He thought it quite jolly,
To build a fine folly,
On an esplanade by the seaside.

Sir William Hutt, by the way, has interesting folly connections if you have time for a couple of detours…

In 1831 Hutt married as his first wife Mary, Dowager Countess of Strathmore (died 1860). She had been the mistress of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, and their relationship was legitimised when he married her from his deathbed in 1820, leaving her a considerable fortune and the mansion at Gibside as her home for life. Hutt had been tutor to her son, John Bowes (1811-1885), at Cambridge and thus met Mary. Gibside, with its landscape dotted with follies, was the couple’s home when Hutt was MP for Gateshead. Hutt advised and encouraged his stepson when he and his wife, Josephine, embarked on a project to create a museum in Barnard Castle, Co. Durham – famed today as the Bowes Museum. A new exhibition inspired by Josephine’s collecting has just opened at the Bowes Museum.

In 1842 when Hutt was Member of Parliament for Gateshead, he was part of the committee convened to decide how to commemorate the life of John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham. It was Hutt who put forward the resolution that suggested a monument of an ‘architectural character’ on Penshaw Hill, near the late earl’s Lambton Castle estate. This eventually took shape as the grand Penshaw Monument, loosely modelled on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens.

Your thoughts are always welcome. Please scroll down to the comments box to share any observations, and thank you for reading.