The Folly Flâneuse is taking a short break to catch up with family, friends, and (of course) follies, and will be back next week. She sends her best wishes to all readers, and hopes that you too are able to enjoy the relaxation of restrictions, whilst remaining safe and well.

Meanwhile here is the jaunty yellow boathouse at Belton Park in Lincolnshire. Designed by Anthony Salvin and built in c.1838-9, it was restored by the National Trust in 2008.

High above Belton House, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, stands this quirky tower with views back to the mansion. It consists of a room perched above a tall arch, and its spindly, leg-like supports, gave rise to its supposed local name of Lord Brownlow’s Britches.

We will return to Lord Brownlow later, but for now we are interested in the builder of the tower: Sir John Brownlow (1690-1754) who was created Viscount Tyrconnel in 1718. He settled at Belton in the early 1720s, and at that date the gardens were in the formal style of the previous century. He did not sweep this all away, as so many of his generation did, but the gardens were old-fashioned, and as one visitor in 1744 noted waspishly ‘the park and gardens were reckoned fine 30 years ago’. Tyrconnel added such à la mode garden features as a wilderness, a sham ruin and a grand orangery, as well as the Bellmount tower eyecatcher.

No architect is recorded, but we know that master builder and joiner Samuel Smith erected the tower, which carries a plaque naming and dating the building: BELLMOUNT 1750 (but note that the National Trust call it Belmount Tower).The upper room was used as an observatory and a belvedere. Lord Tyrconnel was interested in science, and had microscopes and a telescope in his study, and may have used the tower to stargaze. Bellmount was also a place in which to entertain guests, and allow them to admire and appreciate his extensive park and gardens. A visitor a few years after it was completed wrote that ‘from a temple in the garden called Belle Mount you may see seven counties at once’ (sadly she doesn’t name them, so you will have to figure them out for yourself).

The tower was also an eyecatcher from the mansion, and terminated the vista along the eastern avenue.

But what we see today is not the original building. A painting by John Harris, on display in the house, shows the landscape as it was just after the hilltop belvedere was built. It can also be seen, top centre, in this engraving by Badeslade; at that date it had a pair of wings flanking the lofty tower. Tyrconnels’s great-nephew, Brownlow Cust (1744-1807), created Baron Brownlow in 1776, who succeeded to Belton in 1770, improved the park with guidance from his friend Philip Yorke of Erdigg, and professional landscaper William Emes. Yorke disliked the wings on the belvedere, calling them the ‘most offending members’ and suggesting they be ‘cut off’. Brownlow clearly followed his advice, and this emasculation accounts for the odd proportions of the building today and the curious buttresses which replaced the wings. As Barbara Jones wrote in 1953 it is ‘a very strange building and well worth a visit’.

The army had used the park for exercises since the late 19th century, and in 1891 the 1st Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment enjoyed the ‘finest views’ from their tents by Bellmount. During the First World War the park at Belton was home to a huge training camp, and the tower became a focus for manoeuvres.

Lord Brownlow gave Belton House and a part of the estate to the National Trust in 1984. The Bellmount tower was subsequently acquired with the help of funds from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Although the tower was restored in 1989-90, it is in need of further repair.

In 2020 National Heritage Lottery funding was secured for a major project to reconnect parts of the Belton estate which had become fragmented. The National Trust and the Woodland Trust will work together to link the park around Bellmount with Londonthorpe Woods on the edge of Grantham. There are also plans to restore the grade II* listed tower and add interpretation.

For more on Belton see the excellent National Trust guidebook written by Adrian Tinniswood in 1992.

Bellmount Tower can not be accessed from Belton Park, but is accessed via a separate car park on Five Gates Lane. Belton is a National Trust property https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/belton-house

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In the middle of the 18th century the area around Dunston was unenclosed heath, and travel was a dirty and dangerous business, especially in the dark winter months. Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-1781), 2nd baronet, of West Wycombe and Hell-fire Club fame, came into property in the area when he married Sarah Ellys of nearby Nocton in 1745. Dashwood erected the Dunston Pillar in 1751 as a beacon to guide ‘the peasant, the wayfaring stranger, and the horseman with his dame on pillion’.

Described a few years later as an ‘exceedingly lofty tower’, a staircase led to the top where a glass lantern was lit each evening. Around the tower was a ‘neat square court’ with small pavilions at each corner. Dashwood engraved the miles to London and to Lincoln respectively on two of column’s faces, with the inscription ‘Dunston Pillar’ on the third, and on the south face:

COLUMNAM HANC
UTILITATI PUBLICAE
D.D.D.
F. DASHWOOD
MDCCLI.*

Soon after the tower was constructed, the land around it was enclosed, new roads were constructed, and the Light House was slowly rendered redundant. As early as 1771 one passer-by worried it would soon become a ‘useless obelisk’.

With Dashwood’s reputation as something of a rake, it’s not a great surprise to learn that instead of becoming redundant, the tower and grounds entertained the Lincoln Club. This was a sort of northern outpost of the Hell-fire Club, the mock-religious society dedicated to the pleasures of the table and the bedroom, which met at Medmenham Abbey, on Dashwood’s Buckinghamshire estate.

By 1776 the tower and its enclosure were likened to a London pleasure garden and called the ‘VauxHall of this part of the world’. A ‘kind of Banquetting room’ was built against the north wall, and there was a fine bowling green. The whole was surrounded by plantations which promised to be the ‘Paradise of Lincolnshire’ within a few years. The pillar may also have provided a very grand stand from which to watch horseracing, as the final straight of Lincoln’s first racecourse was aligned with the tower. Further views of equine interest would have featured the hunt, and Armstrong’s 1778 map of Lincolnshire comprehending Lindsay, Kesteven and Holland (Holland being a historical subdivision of Linconlnshire) has a vignette of Dunston Pillar with the horses and hounds passing by (not illustrated).

In 1792 Sir John Dashwood King (1765-1849), who had inherited the baronetcy from his half-brother Sir Francis, tried to get a licence to serve alcohol. He was unsuccessful but presumably did not give up as the following year he had plans drawn up by Mr Lumby, a Lincoln architect, to further extend the banqueting room. An even more spectacular design proposal, undated, unexplained, and unexecuted, would have seen the whole tower encased in a two-storey house.

By the end of the century parts of the Lincolnshire estate had passed to Robert Hobart (1760-1816), 4th earl of Buckinghamshire. In 1810 he commemorated the fifty year reign of George III by replacing the pillar’s lantern, which had collapsed in a storm, with a huge statue of the monarch, and added an inscription of his own:

THE STATUE UPON THIS PILLAR
WAS ERECTED AD 1810
BY ROBERT EARL OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
TO COMMEMORATE THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE REIGN OF HIS MAJESTY
KING GEORGE THE THIRD

Modelled by Joseph Panzetta, who worked at Mrs Coade’s artificial stone manufactory in Lambeth**, the statue was 14 feet high and showed the king in his coronation robes with crown and sceptre.

Tragedy struck when a stonemason fell to his death as the figure was being erected atop the pillar. John Willson was buried in nearby Harmston churchyard, and he is remembered with this wonderful headstone. Like the original pillar, the column is surmounted with a Coade Stone statue, presumably sent from the Lambeth factory and inserted into the stone. Willson is remembered with both a Latin inscription and the English translation:

He who erected the noble King,
Is here now laid dead by Death’s sharp sting

By 1931, His Majesty was also meeting an undignified end as a storm had cost him his right forearm. It could be found, alongside his sceptre, ‘in a hedge bottom near the foot of the pillar’. Ten years later, with World War II underway, the Royal Air Force considered the column a danger to aircraft coming in and out of Coleby Grange Airfield. Initially, the Ministry of Defence decreed that the whole tower must be demolished, but after discussions it was agreed to take it down to a height below the maximum tree line, a reduction of about one-third of the original extent.

Specific instructions were issued to the contractors to dismantle the statue with the greatest care, and to number both the pieces of the King, and the courses of masonry from the tower. However, taking down the statue was more difficult than planned, and pieces of the Coade Stone fractured and fell during the process. The statue was likened to ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and there were quips about ‘putting King George together again’. However with the nation at war, little attention was paid to the issue and the fragments were stacked in the base of the pillar and the door secured.

There they remained until 1953 when the owner of the pillar, Mr Parker, began to press for restoration. After initial misgivings by the MoD, who thought the tower had only a ‘limited and sentimental value’, it was accepted that under the terms of the Compensation (Defence) Act 1939 a contribution to the costs of restoration should be paid. Plans were drawn up to rebuild the tower, and erect a new lantern on the top, but ultimately Lincolnshire County Committee couldn’t commit their share of the costs at a time when the country was still focussed on economy. The owner then gave the fragments of the statue to the Lincolnshire Local History Society, and they were moved to a council depot where, like a Lincolnshire Ozymandias, the shattered visage and other fragments lay in a ‘nettle bed’ before being transferred to the stone mason’s yard at Lincoln Castle. Margaret Jones (known to her colleagues as ‘Boadicea’), was an archaeologist working with the Ministry of Works in Lincolnshire. Writing to Country Life in 1959, she reported that the mason, Mr Freestone (nominative determinism?), was at work on the king’s head, which was in about 12 pieces.

But yet again restoration plans ground to a halt. There was a revival of interest in the 1960s, when it was agreed that part of the statue would be erected on a plinth in the grounds of Lincoln Castle. Plans were drawn up showing two alternatives: the bust, ie head and shoulders, was the first option, and a second showed the statue rebuilt down to the knees (most peculiar in the opinion of this writer). The MoD offered funds but no further action was taken.

The hero of the hour was Brian Loughborough, the Curator of the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, in whose care the fragments of the statue had been placed by the local history society. In the early 1970s he resurrected the idea of erecting the bust at Lincoln Castle and recruited the local MP, the Hon. Joseph Godber, to the cause. Godber went straight to the top: Defence Secretary Peter Carrington, later Lord Carrington. In 1972 the MoD sent a cheque for £450 in full settlement, and with a further £100 from the Department of the Environment, the museum was able to go ahead and place the order for the restoration work to begin in June 1972. The statue was finally complete in 1974 when crowds gathered to see the crown lowered into place.

In 2010 the bust in the castle grounds was further restored by Coade Ltd, the company which has successfully redeveloped the Coade Stone process.

The tower still stands in its truncated form, it is on private land but can be seen from the A15. The inscriptions are badly deteriorated with only odd words still legible. The surviving portions of the tower and the statue are both listed at grade II.

With the remaining fragments safely in storage, and developments in artificial stone technology, it would be amazing to see the statue of King George restored to its full height. But there remains not only the tricky question of money (of course), but also where to put a massive statue that was designed to be viewed from several metres below?

Meanwhile, another version of the Dunston Pillar, with statue intact, can be found in Australia. A sterling silver model of the tower was created by the renowned 18th century silversmith, Paul Storr, in 1811. It was apparently created as a table centrepiece for Sir Joseph Banks, who had an estate nearby, and carries the botanist and voyagers crest on the base. It stands 79cm tall  but is not an exact replica of the pillar as King George is not wearing his crown, and some florid acanthus leaves have been added to the column. It was sold by auction at Christies by his descendants in 1992 and was purchased by The Australiana Fund, a not for profit organisation with the aim of collecting furniture and artworks to display in the country’s official residences.

It is appropriate to find a Sir Joseph Banks connection 200 years after his death in 1820. There are events around the country https://www.joseph-banks.org.uk/2020-2/but The Folly Flâneuse is particularly looking forward to a trip to the seaside https://www.cookmuseumwhitby.co.uk/whats-on/2020-exhibition.html

* The Folly Flâneuse is no Latin scholar but this can (hopefully) be translated as This column for the use of the public Francis Dashwood gave and dedicated as a gift (DDD – Dono Dedit Dedicavit) 1751

** He also modelled the statue of Rowland Hill on its column in Shrewsbury as well as the Nelson pediment at the Royal Naval College in London.