John Bligh, 3rd Earl of Darnley of Cobham Hall, Kent, left instructions in his will that a ‘Chapel or Mausoleum’ be built on Williams Hill, an elevated site on his estate. The building was to receive his body, and those of other family members if they should ‘desire it’. It was to be constructed of the finest materials, and the Earl suggested it ‘might be of a kind with four fronts supporting a pyramid in the middle high enough to be conspicuous’.
Tag: James Wyatt
Beckford’s Tower, Bath, Bath & North East Somerset.
In April 1826 a visitor to Bath noted that William Beckford, a ‘wealthy and capricious voluptuary’, had bought land on Lansdown Hill ‘with the design of erecting a magnificent tower with drest grounds about it’. The visitor knew that this had been planned since soon after Beckford’s move to the city in 1822, but he could see no sign of any progress on the project. Had he arrived just a few months later he would have found builders hard at work.