architecture, Folly, garden history, landscape garden

‘Towering Dreams’ at Compton Verney, Warwickshire.

A new exhibition has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire: Towering Dreams: Extraordinary Architectural Drawings explores how architects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘understood the world around them and the ideas and cultures that inspired them’. The majority of the wonderful drawings in the exhibition are on loan from Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and the subjects include structures we would know today, as well as extraordinary designs that never made it off the drawing board.

architecture, country house, Devon, Folly, Temple

Agatha Christie’s ‘Dead Man’s Folly’

In 1954 Agatha Christie wrote a novella which was intended to raise money for her local church. Upon completion she was so taken with the story that she decided to develop it into a full novel, and submitted a different story to the fundraising effort. The work she had originally written was called Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, and this work was expanded and eventually published in 1956 as Dead Man’s Folly.