In 1981-82 the Royal Mail issued a set of stamp books featuring follies, and Richard Downer, an artist best known for the vast number of lovely line drawings he provided for the covers of Britain’s telephone directories, was commissioned to provided the illustrations. Of the six follies featured, five survive today and are very familiar to anyone with an interest in the subject, but one was relatively obscure, and has a rather interesting history.

Outside of post office opening hours, stamps could be bought from vending machines attached to the building. The stamp books had cardboard covers to protect the postage stamps, and these covers were often illustrated with subjects such as museums, period costumes and postal history.

Downer (born 1933) trained at Leeds College of Art. He then worked as an art director for an advertising agency, before setting up his own design consultancy. Alongside this work, he produced the drawings for the covers of telephone directories from 1967 to 1985, working initially for the GPO and continuing as the organisation became Post Office Telecommunications and then British Telecom. He liked to sketch on-the-spot, and was often an item of curiosity to passers-by. Many stopped to talk, and on one occasion Downer was aware of someone edging ever closer and peering over his shoulder at his sketch (it was his rule to chat, but never to look up from his work). Eventually the person spoke, asking ‘are you going to colour it in when you get home?’

Downer was commissioned in February 1981, and offered a fee of £750 for the six designs. The Post Office’s design team asked the National Trust to suggest folly subjects, and they replied with a copy of an article on ‘National Trust Follies’ which Barbara Jones had recently written for their members’ magazine.

The trust also sent a list of suggested follies which included Creech Arch in Dorset and the Temple of the Winds at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. The first was discarded, for reasons unknown, and the latter was replaced with the similar structure in County Down, presumably to ensure a good geographical spread. The National Trust properties of Paxton Tower, Mow Cop, Stourhead and Cliveden were all chosen to feature.

Things got rather complicated when a subject in Scotland was required. Downer had already visited what he thought was Mugdock Castle and sketched it for the cover of the Argyll and Lomond telephone directory, issued in 1976. Although it was later established, after some debate, that the building was actually in Stirlingshire, no-one spotted a further error and thousands of telephone directories were circulated ‘without a whisper of anything wrong’.

But Mr Arthur Brown of Southampton purchased a stamp book in August 1981, and noticed that the folly was wrongly named. Having explored the ancient Mugdock Castle as a youth he recognised the little tower, and wrote to the Chief Postmaster in Glasgow to point out that the building featured was not Mugdock Castle, but a nearby tower. The letter was forwarded to the Post Office HQ in London and the planning department of the Central Regional Council were consulted. They confirmed that ‘Mugdock Castle’ was an old fortification, and that the tower was a folly in the surrounding estate. But with the stamp books already in circulation there was little the Post Office could do, although it seems Mr Brown’s was the sole comment, as there is no further correspondence on file.

Locals know the little tower as ‘Smith’s Folly’ as it was built in the early 19th century by James Smith of Craigend. It was constructed ‘partly as an ornament to his grounds and partly for the sake of the splendid view’, and was described in 1922 as being 45-50 feet high, with a stone spiral staircase of ‘interesting construction’, although the writer did not elaborate on the design.

Sadly the tower was then allowed to become derelict. By 1975 the building was a shell, with only skeletal remains of the spiral staircase. This was the view sketched by Downer. Later, the upper storey was taken down, leaving only the ground floor with its gothic windows to be seen. Eventually this too was pulled down, leaving only a few courses of stonework.  In 2020 plans were submitted to rebuild the category C listed tower on new foundations, as part of a new semi-subterranean family home. Plans seem to have been withdrawn before the local authority’s decision process began.

Garden buildings have also appeared on an enchanting set of Swedish stamps issued in 2003. Here they are on the first-day cover:

And architect and designer Raymond McGrath created these stamps featuring Irish follies Dromoland Belvedere and Connolly Folly. They were issued in 1978, a year after his death. Do any philatelists out there know of more examples of follies featuring on stamps?

Update September 2022: Here is a stamp issued in 1993 as part of the Art in the 20th Century series. It features the pagoda at Kew Gardens, London

The genuine Mugdock Castle ruins, as well as the ruins of Smith’s Craigend Castle, are features of Mugdock Country Park https://www.mugdock-country-park.org.uk and the remains of the gazebo are nearby on private land.

More of Richard Downer’s work can be seen here http://drawingsoflondon.com/home.html

You can read about the garden buildings featured on the Swedish stamps here http://follies.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/ebulletin/Foll-e-49-Fem-Lusthusen.pdf

After her visit to the Postal Museum Archives the Folly Flâneuse had a great morning exploring the Postal Museum itself, including a trip on the redundant underground Mail Rail – highly recommended! https://www.postalmuseum.org

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The sham castle folly on Mow Cop was built by Randle Wilbraham of Rode Hall in 1754 as a summerhouse to which the family could ride for picnics. Its elevated position meant it could be seen from the mansion, some three miles away on the Cheshire side of the county boundary.

The folly became famous in 1807 when it was the site of the meeting that launched Primitive Methodism. Since that date there have been regular assemblies at Mow Cop to mark the anniversary. The centenary celebrations in 1907 led one journalist (whom we can assume to be a member of the established church) to comment that Mow Cop looked like ‘a gigantic ant-hill’ which crawled with ‘thousands and thousands of pilgrims’.

Local people had always enjoyed access to the folly and the surrounding land, and there was an outcry and public demonstrations in 1923 after an entrepreneur bought the site from the Wilbraham family, and began quarrying. Public access was once more secure when in 1937 the land and folly were given to the National Trust (although in 1945 the trust’s James Lees Milne would dismiss it as ‘the ridiculous castle folly’). https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/alderley-edge-and-cheshire-countryside/features/mow-cop

It used to be possible to climb right up to the tower, but it is now fenced off for the inevitable health and safety reasons. The wall’s rugged ruined outline has sadly been rebuilt into neat right-angles, but it remains the most perfectly designed and situated of follies, and surely the inspiration for Old John Tower in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire and St David’s Ruin in Yorkshire https://thefollyflaneuse.com/the-ruin-bingley-west-yorkshire/

Jessica Hallen (née Brooke) grew up locally and after attending art school in Burslem and London became a ceramicist. She was employed by Wade’s Pottery in 1930 and became acclaimed for her figurines, which were affordable versions of those produced by grander firms such as Doulton. Her employment terminated in around 1940, when the outbreak of war meant that the factory produced ceramics for the war effort rather than fancy goods. She continued to freelance for the major potteries and in 1957 she designed a ceramic model of the folly on Mow Cop. There’s very little information on Jessie (who styled herself ‘Jessie van Hallen’ for reasons unknown), but this was perhaps in celebration of 150 years of the Primitive Methodist movement. The Dilford Pottery produced further issues from her moulds after her death. Jessie died in 1983 and was buried at St Luke’s, on the hillside below Mow Cop.

The Ruin, as it is called on the earliest OS maps, was built by Benjamin Ferrand and is inscribed with his initials and the year 1796. Also known as Ferrand’s Folly, or Harden Grange Folly, there is no explanation for why it later became known as St David’s Ruin. 

The Ferrand family had two properties: St Ives, a house below Harden, and Harden Grange, an estate higher up across the valley, although confusingly they exchanged names in the middle of the 19th century. The Ruin was built as an eye-catcher on an outcrop of rock high up above the valley of the Harden Beck. The folly is now engulfed in woodland; but whilst it has lost its role as a distant object it is now very romantically situated in a small glade amongst pines.

‘The fast lock’d tower where ivy loves to creep,
Seems like the remains of some old Castle Keep’

So wrote the little-known Yorkshire poet Robert Carrick Wildon, in ‘Lines suggested while sitting at the Ruins’ in around 1850.

Old photos show the top of the tower with a rough sham-ruined finish  and that is how it still looked in c.1950 when it was sketched by Barbara Jones for her book Follies and Grottoes. The top was rebuilt for safety reasons soon after her visit, as shown in the photo’ above. Thanks to Neil Jennings Fine Art for this image of her original sketch.

The ruin is one of a group of three very similar folly structures across Britain, the others being Mow Cop in Cheshire and Old John in Bradgate Park in Leicestershire.

The folly inspired librarian John Braine when he was writing Room at the Top, published in 1957. In the novel the hero climbs up to see the St Clair folly, which Braine described in 1969 as being created in his imagination as a mixture of St David’s Ruin and the monumental Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland.

Sadly, although an earlier version of this post stated that the folly could be accessed via a permissive footpath, this is not the case and the owner of the woods made contact to ask that it was made clear that they are strictly private.

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