At Rydal Hall in Cumbria is an unassuming little garden building. It was built by Sir Daniel Fleming, in the last years of the 1680s, as a summerhouse from which to view of one of the series of cascades on the Rydal Beck that flowed though his estate.

Sir Daniel’s accounts show that the summerhouse was built in 1668-9, and it was described only a few years later as ‘a little grotto [for] retirement’. But its big secret was the ‘very surprising’ view of a tumbling cascade, framed by the window of the ‘Grot-house’. The interior did not have the expected decoration of shells and minerals usually associated with grottoes, but was expensively fitted out with wooden panelling, sadly now lost. Just upstream Sir Daniel added a rustic arched bridge, which gave a view down onto the cascade and to the grotto.

Many descriptions of the grotto were written in the 18th and 19th centuries, when travellers and writers arrived first in pursuit of the picturesque, when Rydal was a ‘must’ on the tourists’ itinerary, and then in reverence of the romantic after William Wordsworth made his home at nearby Rydal Mount, generating another tourism boom (the cascade is mentioned in the poet’s An Evening Walk).

Visitors record being led along a shady walk by a guide who then opened the doors to the simple ‘Rugged House’ to reveal the cataract. In 1812 the guide was ‘a woman bent nearly double with age, who with astonishing alacrity stumped up the hill in a pair of wooden shoes’. (It is a curious characteristic of ‘tourist attractions’ in the 18th century, that the guides were elderly ladies – examples are recorded at the Claife Station and the Bowder Stone in the Lakes, where a blunt tourist found his guide ‘rather deficient in understanding’. At Roslin Chapel in Scotland,  it was noted in 1788 that the ‘old woman who shows it […] is as great a curiosity as the chapel’.)

William Gilpin, famed for his pontificating on the picturesque, found the scene enchanting, and described the beautiful view from the summerhouse window as ‘like a picture in a frame’. A visitor in 1791 appreciated the carefully composed effect seen through the window: ‘over the head of the cascade is an old bridge, and over that a thicket of tall trees – and over that a dark mountain – and over that perhaps a dark cloud’. To the holidaying Londoner this was all very striking, and filled his mind ‘with terror and amazement’. After all this excitement guests could relax and dine in the little room: in 1795 Harriet Clarke recorded in her journal ‘in this grotto we ate, with much pleasure, our morning’s repast’.

Many artists delineated the scene. As well as the views shown here, other works include a John Constable sketch (Abbott Hall, Kendal) and an oil painting by Julius Caesar Ibbetson (Liverpool Museums). But as the keen-eyed will have spotted, they mainly painted the view from inside the grotto, so views of the building itself are scarce.

Many gardens and landscapes would go on to use the concept of the ‘surprise view’. For example at Studley Royal in Yorkshire doors were flung open for the grand reveal of the ruins of Fountains Abbey, and in Scotland the hermitages at Acharn and Dunkeld were both designed to allow a first sighting of waterfalls, but Sir Daniel Fleming’s predates these curiosities by almost a century, and was a ‘picturesque’ viewing station way ahead of its time.

In 1980 the grade II* listed grotto was described as ‘forlorn and neglected’, with the roof falling in and only a fragment of the wainscot surviving. Happily, it was restored in 2005-2007 as part of a major project to renovate the Rydal Hall gardens and park.

The falls are best seen after heavy rain. The Folly Flâneuse, with her usual impeccable timing, chose to first visit in autumn of 2021 during heavy rain, but it was worth getting soaked to see the cascade in full flow. This is the view from a bridge just downstream, not extant when the grotto was built, which enables the grotto and cascade to be seen in one view. Happily a return visit in spring was a brighter experience.

And of course if one visits Wordsworth country in April, one can’t miss the last of the …

Rydal Hall is now owned by the Diocese of Carlisle and is a conference and retreat centre. The grounds are open to visitors throughout the year, and you can continue the more than 300 year old tradition of viewing the cascade from the grotto window. As a visitor wrote in 1799, the ‘lower cascade must ever delight’. https://www.rydalhall.org

For the full history of the construction of the grotto see Blake Tyson’s article in Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, Vol 24, 1980.

For Wordsworth Grasmere see https://wordsworth.org.uk

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Clarkson’s History of Richmond, revised in 1821, recounts that Cuthbert Readshaw created a ‘highly romantic walk’ by the Swale in 1760. Cuthbert Readshaw, who died in 1773 was a merchant who lived in the Bailey (ie the market place) in Richmond, and according to his will he was in ‘the business of wine and spirits and other branches of trade’.

To access the walk 18th century visitors would have travelled downhill from the town centre and crossed the river via the Green Bridge. Promenading along the south bank of the River Swale they would have encountered the picturesque scene of leafy Billy Bank Wood (aka Bordel Bank) and occasional artful outbreaks of the craggy rock face behind. Tucked in the woods was the cleft or cave known as Arthur’s Oven, conjuring romantic images of ancient and wilder times.

Eventually visitors would reach the conical hill called Round Howe. This neat mound also excited the senses with many believing it to be the site of ancient druidic rituals ‘during the earliest periods of British history’. Others thought its origin owed more to geology, being ‘one of the most wonderful productions of nature’. In the 17th and 18th century the landscape was changed by both art and industry; alongside his picturesque riverside enhancements Readshaw, who had extensive mining interests, may have been one of the men working the hillside for copper.

Around the time he laid out the walk Readshaw also landscaped the Round Howe and built a temple on the summit ‘which with his pleasure-boat in the pool below, formed an agreeable contrast to the rude scenery of nature’. Jeffreys’ map published in 1775 shows the wooded hillside had 6 geometric paths leading to the top, with the summerhouse at the hub of the wheel. The temple was both eye-catcher from the town and viewpoint back to the to the panorama of the town, castle, river. The view also encompassed the Yorke seat The Green, on the opposite bank, topped with the the elegant and prominent Culloden Tower of c.1746 (now Landmark Trust). It is not clear if Readshaw was creating the landscape for his own personal use, or if it was a commercial venture like the London pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh.

The agricultural commentator Arthur Young visited Richmond in the late 1760s and described ‘a little temple… at a distance in the vale, romantically situated among hanging woods’ which added ‘much to the scene’. This view (above) by George Cuit seems to be the only pictorial record, and shows it was a classical rotunda with Corinthian columns, garlanded frieze and a shallow domed roof reminiscent of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

Curiously, although Richmond was visited by many tourists in the later decades of the 18th century, Young’s is the only contemporary account of the temple known to survive, probably because the structure had only a brief existence. A visitor in 1779 described the ‘picturesque hill’ across the river from the Mr Yorke’s house The Greens, but makes no mention of a temple, and a 1791 engraving of the scene shows that the hilltop is bare. Was it poorly built and soon collapsed? Was it an ephemeral structure, never intended to have a long life?  Did Readshaw’s lease of the land expire? No explanation has been found; please comment below if you can help.

A further complication is added by the difficulty in separating the inter-connected Readshaw families living in Richmond in the late 18th century – all of who seem to have been called Caleb or Cuthbert. In 1768 Arthur Young said the little temple belonged to ‘Mr Ritchie’ and this was corrected to ‘Mr Readshaw in the 2nd edition of his Six Months Tour through the North of England, published in 1771. Young doesn’t give a first name, and it is not until Clarkson’s heavily revised edition of the History of 1821 that the name Cuthbert Readshaw is used. By this date the temple was gone, and Clarkson was clearly relying on hearsay as he erroneously described the former building as ‘chinese’. So was Cuthbert Readshaw the builder, or could it have been Caleb Readshaw of The Grove, another prominent Richmond citizen of the time? Another mystery to be solved.

The Round Howe and Billy Bank Wood are in the care of the National Trust. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hudswell-woods

NB this post was revised on 1 December and Jane Hatcher, Richmond historian, is thanked for her help.