The tower on Leith Hill was erected in the 1760s by Richard Hull. The hillside wasn’t actually his property, but his home was nearby and he leased the plot from the landowners, the Evelyn family of nearby Wotton. It became a popular attraction and in 1790 it was said that the view from the tower was ‘esteemed equal, if not superior, to any in the kingdom’. Hull was so fond of his tower that he designated it as his mausoleum.

From the very start Hull, who lived at Leith Hill Place, intended the tower to be a public amenity to be enjoyed by ramblers and day-trippers. A plaque was placed above the entrance and, in summary, the Latin inscription recorded that the tower was built for the prospect, which Hull wished to be enjoyed by all.

Hull died in 1772 leaving an extraordinarily detailed will in which he gave some ‘further direction’ for his executors, setting out how he wished to be laid to rest. He desired to be buried in a very private ceremony, with only his servants present, ‘in a Grave made for me under my Tower on Leith Hill’. A plaque recorded his death as having taken place on 18 January 1772 and stated that he had purchased ‘Leith-hill Place’ for his retirement where he lived as a ‘true Christian and rural Philosopher’.

Soon after Hull’s death the tower was allowed to decay and, ‘accelerated by the hands of the mischievious’, the interior was stripped leaving the tower a shell. In 1788 the antiquarian and traveller William Bray told an audience how sorry he was to find that the tower was ‘already become a ruin’. Although the plaque on the tower gives a date of 1766, it has clearly been recut at some point (the stone has eroded but it appears to give the date of construction in a bizarre combination of Roman and Arabic numerals as MDCC66), and Bray gives the more likely date of 1763, which is corroborated by title deeds which mention the tower in 1765.

In the last years of the eighteenth century William Perrin of Tanhurst, who then owned Leith Hill Place, had the exterior of the tower ‘thoroughly repaired’. To stop further vandalism the lower room was filled with ‘lime and rubbish’, and the entrance walled up. He also raised the height of the tower to make it ‘still more conspicuous as a sea-mark’.

In 1864 William John Evelyn of Wotton added a staircase turret to the tower so that the views from the top could once more be enjoyed by what Barbara Jones called ‘county counters’. She didn’t specify just which shires are allegedly visible from the rooftop, but in 1899 it was suggested that ‘visitors with a glass’ could see twelve counties and a circuit of 200 miles.

In the later years of the ninetenth century tourists could also enjoy teas and ginger beer provided Mrs Skilton, the custodian of the tower. After 30 years in that post, aged 72, her sight was apparently so good that she could see the dome of St Paul’s, ships in the English Channel and Windsor Castle without a telescope. She also claimed that forty churches were visible from the top of the tower. There are countless picture postcards of the tower showing the many visitors who climbed the hill, but sadly no photographs have been found showing the kangaroos that Evelyn ‘set loose’ on Leith Hill, although they apparently ‘flourished for years till gradually exterminated by ruthless individuals’.

The tower also inspired the artist Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), who could see it from his studio. He used it as a model in a number of works, including this watercolour of the ‘high lonely tower’ in Milton’s Il Penseroso

In 1922 the tower was offered for sale, and there were fears that public access would be lost. In March 1923 it was announced that ‘all lovers of rural Surrey’ would rejoice to learn that the tower, and five acres of land around it, were to be given to the National Trust, thanks to the generosity of Reigate businessman W. J. MacAndrew. The tower was restored in 1984 when workmen uncovered Hull’s tomb during the works.

Follies have appeared on stamps, stamp-books and coins, but this is the first example the Flâneuse has found of a folly on a sugar cube wrapper. At date unknown Tate+Lyle featured Leith Hill Tower on a wrapper which celebrated Surrey as the home of the Magna Carta. How many people idly stirred two lumps into their coffee without even noticing the handsome folly on the wrapper?

The tower can be climbed on certain days in the summer season, taking visitors to the highest point in the county, and there is always access to the hillside to appreciate the exterior. As early postcards show, it was a stiff climb up to the tower, but today a car park on the slope of the hill allows a gentler ascent. The wider site remains part of the Evelyn’s Wotton Estate, and public access is managed by Surrey County Council. A cafe operates from a hatch at the foot of the tower serving light refreshments (alas, no sugar cubes with a view of the tower). Leith Hill Place is also in the care of the National Trust and can be visited in the summer season. There’s more access information here.

Thank you for reading. As ever your thoughts are very welcome, as are any further examples of follies on sugar cube wrappers. Scroll down to find the comments box at the foot of the page.

In 1896 a new publication was launched in Britain. Pearson’s Magazine was a miscellany of fact and fiction, and is best known today for a landmark event of 1922: the appearance of the first ever crossword puzzle in a British publication. Only a year after it first appeared on newsstands the magazine was attracting writers of the highest calibre, including H.G.Wells whose The War of the Worlds was serialised in 1897. But of course what caught the eye of the Folly Flâneuse was an article from 1898 when Edward le Martin-Breton, wrote an illustrated article on ‘Famous Follies’.

Mr le Martin-Breton declared the raison d’être of follies to be the desire of men who are ‘possessed of more money than they know what to do with’ to proclaim their ‘wealth and position’. Whilst this is unarguably the case with some follies, le Breton-Martin seems to have been almost totally immune to the romance, charm or glorious eccentricity of the genre.

At Leith Hill Tower (Surrey) le Breton-Martin read the Latin inscription claiming the edifice was built not only for the enjoyment of the owner, Richard Hull, but also for his neighbours and ‘for all’. But he remained sceptical: here, he thought, was a tower that perfectly fitted his definition of folly, and he suspected Mr Hull of ‘vainglorious motives’.

He found the view from Broadway Tower (Worcestershire) impressive, but dismissed the folly as ‘a monument to a woman’s whim’. Meanwhile, the panorama from the belvedere at Powderham (Devon) was thought not worth the effort of the climb.

And he described Bond’s Folly, aka Creech Arch (Dorset), an eye-catcher built by Denis Bond in the middle of the 18th century, as ‘a piece of useless architecture’ (surely the reason why so many of us are fascinated and delighted by it?).

He wondered if the builder of the Ammerdown Column (Somerset) could not have found a better way to spend his money, and declared the Sham Castle on the Bath skyline to be a ‘hollow fraud’.

The obelisk at Woolverstone (Suffolk) seems to have particularly irked him. The obelisk was erected in 1793 by Charles Berners in memory of William, ‘the best of fathers’.  Whilst admiring the structure itself, our hard-to-please Mr le Martin-Breton did not find this a noble gesture. Instead he wrote: ‘Filial piety is a very beautiful thing, but at the same time I fail to see why such piety should be made the excuse for perpetuating such a useless object’. Sadly, we can’t visit and judge for ourselves, as the obelisk was pulled down in 1943 after being damaged by fire. This was a particularly sad loss, as this most interesting obelisk contained a staircase leading up to a ‘huge globe’, representing the sun.

Two follies built within his lifetime failed to impress, either. Turner’s Tower (Gloucestershire) ‘built within the last ten years’ was ‘hideous’ and a ‘monstrosity’ and Peterson’s Tower at Sway (Hampshire) elicited the response ‘Beautiful the tower can hardly be said to be’.

Happily two follies did meet with his approval. Conygar Tower on the Dunster Castle estate in Somerset was deemed to be ‘sufficiently picturesque enough to escape the censure that has been given to so many similar erections’. Top marks went to the sham ruined castle at Hagley (which he called Miller’s Folly, after its architect) and it was declared an ‘excellent example of the pseudo-antique’.

Edward le Martin-Breton would go on to write numerous articles for magazines, as well as publishing poetry and producing radio broadcasts. He was best known though to generations of Boy Scouts: his Boys of the Otter Pool was serialised in The Scout magazine in 1908 and it and its sequels were later published in book form with translations into French and Finnish.

Turner’s Tower (which featured in these pages recently) was demolished in the 1960s and Woolverstone Obelisk is gone. Happily, all of the other follies mentioned here survive to be appreciated today.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts or comments please scroll down to the box at the bottom of the page. 

When the great folly builders of the 17th and 18th centuries were erecting statement buildings on the high points of their estates, they can little have known how useful they would be to the Board of Ordnance. The ‘Principal Triangulation of Britain’ was a trigonometric survey, begun in the late 18th century, which by determining precise coordinates of significant landmarks would enable highly accurate mapping. The main landmarks used were church spires, but ‘other remarkable objects’ were picked, and in the first decade of the 19th century over 50 towers, temples, obelisks, summer houses and follies made it into this category.

Were a convenient church spire not available, the surveyors would occasionally have to make do. Thus two of the more unusual locations were ‘Chimney on the north side of Mr. Evered’s House’, and the rather vague sounding ‘Clump of Trees near the Flying Bull Inn’. They must therefore have been delighted to find an elevated folly from which to carry out their measuring. Of the many landscape ornaments used as ‘stations and intersected objects’, some are very familiar and would be obvious choices if asked to suggest lofty towers: King Alfred’s Tower at Stourhead, Sturt’s Folly in Dorset, and Leith Hill Tower in Surrey to name a few. Obelisks were also favoured: Bramham in Yorkshire, the Frampton Obelisk in Dorset, and the now truncated Norris’s Obelisk in Surrey, are just three that feature in the report. The word ‘obelisk’ was often applied to any tall, thin structure at this date, and so the ‘Earl’s Mount Obelisk’ is actually Robert Adam’s lovely Brizlee Tower at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland (as featured here last week https://thefollyflaneuse.com/brizlee-tower-alnwick-northumberland/).

Most intriguing to The Folly Flâneuse was a structure listed as ‘Justice Waller’s Pleasure House’. The context suggested it was in eastern Lancashire, and a little help from a friend* established that the coordinates led to Clerk Hill, between Whalley and Wiswell. This was the seat of James Whalley (1748-1805), one time High Sheriff of the county of Lancaster and a Justice of the Peace – hence ‘Justice Waller’. The incorrect spelling of his name may have something to do with local pronunciation: Whalley is pronounced Wall-ey. One of the earliest writers to mention the pleasure house made the same error; passing by in 1792 the Hon. John Byng grumbled that Mr Waller had ‘with miserable intention, built some strange ruins on a hill-top’. But then Byng, the most curmudgeonly of travellers, was seldom impressed.

James Whalley (Sir James from 1797 when he inherited the baronetcy from his brother) probably built the gothic folly in the 1780s after he moved to the Clerk Hill estate. Set in its extensive deer park, the folly was comprised of a two storey octagonal central tower linked by walls to flanking towers, forming a symmetrical composition. The battlemented central tower had an upper room for picnics and for watching the hunt, and the outer towers could only be reached by walking along the connecting walls. The whole had panoramic views across the valley of the River Ribble to Pendle Hill. Local legend says that some of the stone was taken from old beacons that formerly stood on the site, and the elevated site would certainly seem appropriate.

The tower was still largely intact in 1944, although the roof and the floor of the upper room had collapsed. A few years later the folly disappeared in a rather dramatic fashion. Late in September 1948 the 510 Squadron of the Royal Engineers of the Territorial Army, with the permission off the landowner, blew up the structure because it had become ‘dangerous’. The local parish council was indignant, but the landowner was completely within his rights: the folly was not scheduled, and he argued that as it was not marked as an antiquity on the Ordnance Survey map, it could not be considered to be of historical importance. The 1st edition map shows the building as ‘Castle’ in a circular plantation called ‘Castle Wood’, and the central tower is shown as the triangulation point used by the surveyors some 50 years earlier. By the 20th century the sham castle had become known as the ‘Baby House Towers’, presumably because of its likeness to a toy fort.

There may be some good news. When follydom’s dapper duo Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp published Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings in 1999, they reported that the then owner of Castle Wood was slowly rebuilding the towers. Does anyone know if he finished?

UPDATE: thanks to the Whalley Local History Group for confirmation that the circular bases are extant on private land, but the towers were never completely rebuilt.

So the moral of this post is ‘never judge a book by its title’. Who would have thought that An Account Of The Trigonometrical Survey, carried on by Order of The Master General of His Majesty’s Ordnance, in the Years 1800, 1801, 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, 1807, 1808, and 1809 could provide so much fascinating material?

*thank you Harry Beamish

The images are from the wonderful resource that is Lancashire County Council’s Red Rose Collection, which contains images of Lancashire people, places and events https://redrosecollections.lancashire.gov.uk/