In 1922 the writer and illustrator Charles George Harper penned a series of three articles about follies for The Architect magazine. Harper was a prolific author and had noted many follies as he toured the nation, often including them in his books on the topography of Britain. The articles were illustrated with his own vignettes of some of the buildings he admired (or censured). As for the foibles, which some may find a rather weak description of the eccentricities of Harper’s character, read on…

As ever in a feature on follies, the author had to deal with the question of a definition. Harper (1863-1943) concluded that a folly was a ‘pleasant fancy’ in the shape of a garden-house, a gazebo or perhaps even a ‘skyline freak’. As he continued, ‘now we have settled the nature of follies, the next thing will be to find some’. This, he thought, would be far from difficult, as the ‘land abounds with them’. Harper was sure that once a folly had been found, ‘the traveller who happens to be of a speculative turn of mind will find his curiosity greatly piqued to learn the story’.

Harper began with the building which he thought was ‘architecturally the most interesting’: the Triangular Lodge at Rushton in Northamptonshire. This was, he wrote, a building in which ‘Sir Thomas Tresham gave full outlet to his peculiar bent of mind’ by building a structure in which all measurements and decorations were governed by the ‘mystic three’.

In Cornwall Harper visited a ‘prime curiosity of the gruesome kind’ in the form of the mausoleum of Sir James Tillie. The monument was then derelict, but peering through a small gap the statue of Tillie could be seen – a ‘ferociously ugly man, with scowling countenance and great protruding paunch.’

Jack Fuller of Sussex (best known as Mad Jack Fuller) was described as ‘one of those squires who could not leave a hill-top alone in its natural beauty, but must needs place on it something in the way of a building, generally something ugly’. This was illustrated with a view of the Sugarloaf, supposedly erected to help Fuller win a bet that he could see Dallington church spire from his home. In fact he couldn’t, and the story goes that the cone was erected in a great hurry to ensure he won the wager.

William Beckford was noted as a man who frittered a fortune building towers, and an elegant sketch of his surviving tower in Bath was included in the article.

Harper was known for his strong opinions, and wasn’t afraid to air them in print. An anonymous review of his The Marches of Wales in The Athenaeum in 1895 noted how he went into ‘rhapsodies on discovering a Conservative cobbler’ but ‘shrieks against Dissenters, teetotallers and Radical politicians’. He was also accused of passing a ‘somewhat unjust judgment on the character of the Welsh people’.

To this list of pet hates might be added the women who were (to his mind) threatening the established order. In particular, Harper was no fan of the increasing numbers of female journalists who had ‘invaded newspaper offices’ and who were all more interested in the ‘cut of a dress’ than the ‘fall of a statesman from office’. He makes this sweeping statement in 1894, in a book that was a curious departure from his usual travelogues: Revolted Women: Past, Present and to Come. After what Harper called Eve’s ‘stupendous faux pas‘, he wondered why womanhood wasn’t content to ‘sit, for all time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot’ instead of aspiring to rule men while they had ‘no efficient control over [their] own hysterical being’.

But back to follies…

Harper also noted that not everything called a folly was actually a built structure with an interesting history. As an example, he gave the hilltop clump of trees in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) which had long been known as Faringdon Folly. One wonders what he made of the tower that Lord Berners erected on the summit only a decade or so later: no doubt it would have fallen into the ‘skyline freak’ category.

All of the follies mentioned are publicly accessible. Most have been covered in these pages – the search function will take you to the relevant posts.

Assuming she can control her own emotions (Harper didn’t think this possible of any females, especially writers) the Flâneuse will be back with another folly story next week. Thank you for reading.

The Flâneuse recently attended the Garden Museum Literary Festival, the annual celebration of gardens and books organised by London’s Garden Museum. It blossoms at a different venue each year, and in 2025 it was held at Iford Manor, near Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, where stands this exceedingly pretty summerhouse.

It was built in the eighteenth century, but renovated and moved to a new location after Iford Manor was bought by the architect and garden designer Harold Peto in 1899. The simple interior needs nothing more than a good book and a pot of coffee to make it quite perfect.

Speaking of which, the lovely village of Corsham was only a few miles from the festival, and it has excellent coffee shops as well as a great independent bookshop. The Flâneuse picked up the new book by an author she greatly admires – Jenny Uglow. Her latest work is A Year with Gilbert White: the First Great Nature Writer, and White’s charming hermitage, as temporarily inhabited by his brother, is featured.

Of course the main attraction in the village was Corsham Court, where the many beauties include this Bath House. The perfect little building was originally built by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1760s, with further gothic ornament added by John Nash around the turn of the eighteenth century.

Back at the festival, the excellent speakers included Cath Kidston, who sold her chain of shops and is now producing a range of perfumed goods inspired by her collection of scented geraniums. Coincidentally, as the Flâneuse travelled to the festival she received the newsletter of the Faringdon Folly Tower Trust containing a pelargonium pronouncement. The trust cares for the tower built by Lord Faringdon in Berkshire (although it is now in Oxfordshire) in 1935. The newsletter announced that the acclaimed nursery Fibrex has created Faringdon Folly, a pelargonium in the same vibrant pink that Lord Berners dyed some of his doves. It will be available in 2026.

The Flâneuse is taking a break and will be back with a folly story in two weeks. The plan is to relax – which brings us nicely back to Iford Manor, and this verdant spot where one can sit back with a cuppa after a busy day.

Thank you for reading.

On a prominent hill above the town of Faringdon in Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire) the ornate top of a tower peeps out above the trees. Faringdon Tower, often known as Lord Berners’ Folly, was built in 1935, but its site had been known as Faringdon Folly for generations.

Although the word folly is best recognised as meaning a foolish act, or in these pages as a quirky piece of architecture, it can also mean a leafy hilltop. Such is the case in Faringdon where the clump of trees atop Faringdon Hill has been known as The Folly for centuries. The hill, once home to a fortification marked on the 1898 Ordnance Survey map as ‘Cromwell’s Battery’, was part of the Faringdon estate, home in 1787 to then then poet laureate Henry James Pye (1745-1813). In that year Pye published his Poems on Various Subjects, in which the hill which is described as ‘a noted landmark’ and celebrated in a long (and rather dreary, so you have been spared) poem.

In 1918 the Faringdon estate was inherited by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), and in 1934 he decided that the arboreal folly should be home to one of the bricks and mortar variety. Some locals were in favour of this ‘admirable endeavour’, believing an Englishman’s home was his castle, and that Berners should be free to build whatever he chose on his land. Others were less than keen, and the town was said to be ‘hot and bothered’ about the plan. A Miss Lobb was convinced that Berners was going to install a siren and a searchlight on the top of the tower, and was concerned this was would disturb the sick and the infirm. This was never part of Lord Berners’s plan for the tower, but his friend Nancy Mitford’s satirised the idea in The Pursuit of Love, in which Lord Merlin is a thinly disguised Berners:

‘A marble folly on a nearby hill was topped with a gold angel which blew a trumpet every evening at the hour of Lord Merlin’s birth […] The folly glittered by day with semi-precious stones, by night a powerful blue beam was trained upon it’.

In a sop to his opponents Berners modified the design so that the tower was only 5 feet above the trees, but Faringdon Rural District Council, acting on the advice of the North Berks Regional Planning Committee, still vetoed the plans, citing their powers under the Town & Country Planning Act. Berners appealed, and an investigation was launched by the Ministry of Health (this government department being, as John Betjeman pointed out, ‘for some mysterious reason the arbiter of public taste in such matters’).

Eventually, in October 1934, the local paper could announce that Lord Berners was ‘to have his way’ after the Ministry granted the appeal (having been given a good lunch at Faringdon House). Work was scheduled to begin in spring 1935, using estate labour augmented by local men, and giving around 6 months of employment. The architect was Lord Gerald Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, a friend of Berners.

Edward Thurlow Leeds, the Keeper of Oxford’s prestigious Ashmolean Museum was asked to examine the site after human skeletons were discovered as the foundations were laid. In May 1935 he summarised his findings for the local paper: ‘a Castle existed on the Faringdon Folly some eight hundred years ago, and […] the skeletons found there are probably those of men killed during King Stephen’s successful attack on it’. The paper was pleased to report that ‘however varied may be the views on the tower […] there is undivided interest in the conclusions which have been reached by the prominent archaeologist’.

Berners was in Europe as the tower went up, and the story goes that he arrived home to find the austere classical shaft not to his taste. He immediately gave orders that the octagonal uppermost storey be flamboyantly gothic in style.

On Guy Fawke’s Night 1935 Berners threw a ‘Tower Warming Party’, with a host of glamorous guests. The evening also marked the birthday of his companion, Robert ‘Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy (1911-1987), and Berners gifted him the tower. Heber-Percy later recalled he had been hoping for a horse.

The opening ceremony concluded with fireworks which were appreciated by the whole town, and local children wrote excitedly of the display to ‘Uncle Ted’, who edited the childrens’ page of the North Wilts Herald. The more athletic local children might have made it to the top of the new tower at the carnival in Faringdon Park in August 1936: ‘Energetic entrants’ had to race from Faringdon House to the room at the top of the tower and back, with the winner apparently covering the distance in under 12 minutes. The journalist covering the fete was impressed – it apparently took him ten minutes just to climb up the tower.

The tower had already found fame as a result of the press coverage of the ups and downs of the planning process, but it became more widely known after it appeared on Britain’s roads. In 1936 the year-old tower joined the list of more venerable follies which appeared in the Shell petrol advertising campaign ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’. 27 artists were asked to create a work featuring a folly, and these paintings were reproduced as posters which were pasted onto the lorries delivering oil and petrol. Berners painted his new tower, which by 1937 was already known as ‘Faringdon’s Famous Folly’.

Much has been written of the eccentricities of Berners – he dyed the feathers of doves in rainbow hues making his lawn ‘exotically gay’, and entertained Penelope Betjeman and her horse to afternoon tea, etc., etc.. But when not occupied with these larks, he was a talented artist and an accomplished composer and writer. His epitaph recognised his many talents, and a life well-lived, concluding ‘But, praise the Lord, he seldom was bored’.

The market town of Faringdon is very proud of its local eccentric, and tributes include coloured doves perched on a windowsill, and this wonderful stone bench which remembers Salvador Dali’s visit to Faringdon House. On that occasion the artist walked through the town wearing the diving suit which had been hired ready for his appearance at an exhibition of Surrealist art. The full text on the bench is a quote from Berners: ‘Mistrust a man who never has an occasional flash of silliness’.

The press coverage of the controversial tower might have inspired a story by the prolific writer of ‘rattling good stories of school life’, R.A.H. Goodyear. It is surely not coincidence that a novel featuring a dispute over a folly tower was published in 1936, just after Faringdon Tower hit the headlines?

The School’s Airmen is set in a Yorkshire public school, and tells how the boys attempt to thwart the village shopkeeper’s plan to erect a ‘monstrous edifice’ on a nearby hill. Every time Mr Puncheon has stone carted up to the site, the boys hire a lorry and tip the stone into a stream, or steal the workmen’s tools and hack away the foundations, whilst the masters turn a blind eye. The builders (‘bone idle slackers’) try  to defend Puncheon, just as Lord Berners’s supporters had done, saying ‘who is to stop a man building anything he likes on his own land!’. Despite the efforts of the schoolboys, the tower, quickly dubbed Old Punch’s Folly, ‘rose steadily skywards’.

The dramatic denouement sees puny young Aimard, one of the few boys who finds favour with the shopkeeper, fall from the scaffolding around the tower. A schoolboy airman is despatched to Ireland in one of the school’s planes (in poor visibility for added drama) to pick up the badly-injured boy’s parents. In true movie fashion the anxious schoolboys assemble in the quad to await his return, until at last the plane emerges from the gloom to make a textbook landing. Aimard makes a slow but sure recovery and Puncheon declares the tower will be taken down, and instead spends the money on two prizes to be awarded annually by the school.

Perhaps if Old Punch’s Folly had been completed (and had not been fictional) it would eventually have become, like Faringdon Tower, a popular local landmark. Robert Heber-Percy later recalled that the locals had completely forgotten that they ever disliked it.

Whilst the flâneurs of 19th century Paris might have been content to stroll the boulevards, with an occasional exertion to reach the height of Montmartre, this Flâneuse suffers for her art, forever ascending eminences in search of follies.

And if the hill is topped with a lofty tower then there is more work to be done. But there are rewards…

Heber-Percy, gave the tower to the Faringdon Folly Tower Trust, ‘to ensure that the public have use of, and enjoyment of, the tower and its surroundings’. It was listed at grade II in 1986, when just over half a century old. It is now open regularly, and you can learn more here https://www.faringdonfolly.org.uk

UPDATE October 2022. Researching the folly tower at Woodhouse Grove School in Yorkshire the Folly Flâneuse discovered that Goodyear was a pupil, and would also have been influence by the late 18th century tower in the school grounds. Read more https://thefollyflaneuse.com/elams-tower-woodhouse-grove-apperley-bridge-west-yorkshire/

Comments are always welcome – please scroll to the foot of the page to share any thoughts or information. Thank you for reading.