On a wooded eminence on the Foxley Estate, Herefordshire, stands a tower that was built as a belvedere by the Price family in the first half of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century it had fallen into disrepair, but was restored in the 1970s with the guidance of an impressive group of experts in the field.

The Foxley estate is best known as the home of Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829), the writer on the picturesque, but the belvedere tower was built before he was born. A letter of 1714 notes that ‘Mr Price is resolved to have a Summer House on top of the mount’. The Mr Price in question was either Robert Price (1653-1732) who built a new mansion at Foxley after he inherited the estate upon the death of his father-in-law in 1691, or his son Uvedale Tomkins Price (1685-1764). Both were keen improvers.

An exact date for the construction of the tower has not yet been found, but it was extant by 1738 when a visitor noted the ‘Room’ which had been erected ‘upon the top of a very pretty Hill of a great Hight, from whence you have also a vast variety of Views for a prodigious Circle round’.

The Castle and Mount at Foxley sketched by Robert Price in 1744. Courtesy of Hereford City Library.

A tourist in 1752 also admired the ‘Prospects’ from the ‘Summer House’, but after that date the building seems to have been ignored, or perhaps it was by then hidden by maturing trees? Visitors instead were shown Lady Lift (sometimes Lady’s Lift), a loftier hill north of the house, which had been laid out with winding walks to the summit and allegedly gave a view of nine counties.

In the nineteenth century the estate was purchased by the Davenport family, who are still the owners today. By the 1880s the folly, called simply ‘The Castle’ on a sketch taken in the middle of the eighteenth century, had become known as ‘Ragged Castle’ and is marked as such on the Ordnance Survey maps.

The mansion was occupied by the American and Canadian military during the Second World War. Presumably they were not good tenants for the house was pulled down in 1948 as beyond repair, although the Davenport family retained the estate and continued to live locally. The folly was largely intact until 1955 when the lead was stolen from the roof.

In September 1974 Major D. J. Davenport wrote to the Georgian Group asking if anyone could help him find out more about his folly, which was ‘somewhat of an enigma’. The Georgian Group forwarded the letter to architect and folly aficionado Neville Hawkes, who in turn requested the assistance of Dorothy Stroud (curator at the Soane Museum and author of books on Capability Brown and Humphry Repton), Mavis Batey (leading light of the Garden History Society) and Marcus Binney (contributor to Country Life and co-curator of the exhibition The Destruction of the English Country House, which would open at the Victoria & Albert Museum less than a month after Major Davenport’s letter). Sadly, the responses of this learned trio have not been found.

Hawkes, a passionate recorder of follies, was particularly intrigued by Major Davenport’s description of the tower as being diamond-shaped in plan, and confessed that although he had a huge collection of photographs of follies, he had ‘no diamond’. Keen to fill the gap, Hawkes visited the Ragged Castle in October 1974 and snapped the derelict folly.

The Major, obviously impressed by the enthusiastic architect, asked him to draw up plans to restore the little tower in memory of his father who had ‘loved these woods’.

Hawkes believed that the gothic window frames, fragments of which remained in situ, were later additions as they could be seen to be a poor fit. He therefore proposed restoring the tower with 12 paned sash windows.

The restored tower (which sadly the Flâneuse could not gain permission to see) is listed at grade II and is now a Davenport family memorial. There is no public access.

The Flâneuse is grateful to Dr Michael Cousins for sharing the accounts of early visitors to the castle and to the Folly Fellowship for permission to publish the photographs.

Thank you for reading. The comments box is at the foot of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or information. If you would like a complimentary folly story in your inbox every Saturday morning please click the subscribe button. 

The Flâneuse recently puzzled over this black and white photograph of a tall archway that is annotated ‘Breedon-on-the-Hill’. Internet searches using every combination of the village name with ‘arch’, ‘gate’ and ‘folly’, and as many other ideas as the Flâneuse could come up with, drew a complete blank. But driving into the village there it was, just to our right, and unchanged since the older photograph was taken.

A little way further along the wall from the gateway three letters are created from a patchwork of stone blocks near the entrance to a busy quarry. They abbreviate the former name of the works, the Breedon and Cloud Hill Lime Works Company: Breedon has been the site of quarrying and lime extraction since the eighteenth-century.

Aerial photographs of the quarry, taken in the middle of the twentieth century, show the gateway standing in what appears to be a bare plot, but it is still not immediately clear what purpose the arch serves.

Happily the excellent Breedon-on-the-Hill parish website has links to two volumes of pictorial history which explain that the ‘gateway’ was the centrepiece of a rockery, one of a number built by the owner of the quarry to beautify the village. By the late 1950s the village had become known for these rockery gardens of ‘artistic stonework’ which were planted with flowers and full of ‘vital colour’. According to the history, much of the rockwork was created freehand by Lawrence Wakefield, although the archway is not specifically attributed to him.

For much of the twentieth century the quarry was owned and/or managed by the Shields family. In 1959 Captain C.F. Shields, Managing Director of the works, told a reporter from the Leicester Evening Mail that providing good houses for workers, and ornamenting the village, was ‘making a return’ for ‘despoiling the rock that gives the village its name and character’. And of course the stonework was a great advertisement for the company’s products which included ‘rockery and grotto stone’.

Through the archway, which stands on the village’s Main Street, are steps leading up to the quarry offices, although sadly they now terminate in a ‘keep out’ sign.

If visiting Breedon-on-the-Hill don’t miss the village’s other attractions which include an eighteenth century lockup and the very pleasing War Memorial to those lost in the First and Second World Wars.

Take time to explore the church of St Mary and St Hardulph, which stands high above the village close to the quarry face (it is just out of shot in the aerial photo’ – it stands on the plateau above the quarry face on the right). As well as important Anglo-Saxon sculpture there are also fine tombs, including a vast monument to Sir George Shirley and his family, dated 1598, which features this intricate life-size memento mori.

Thank you for reading and do please get in touch if you know more about the arch, or would like to share any thoughts. The comments box can be found at the foot of the page.

P.S. A well-known landscape ornament has been in the news this week and deserves a mention. Beckford’s Tower, near Bath, won the Award for Restoration of a Georgian Building in a Landscape at the Georgian Group Architectural Awards 2025. Congratulations to all the team at the Bath Preservation Trust

In 1807 the 9th earl of Winchelsea built a rustic retreat deep in woodland in his park at Burley-on-the-Hill. The building was known as ‘The Hermitage’, and soon became the subject of tales which were somewhat fanciful, even in the fantastical world of follies.

George Finch (1752-1826) succeeded his uncle as the 9th Earl of Winchelsea in 1769. The Burley-on-the-Hill estate that he inherited included the elegant mansion on its hilltop site, a building which will be familiar to anyone who has driven near Oakham in Rutland.

The parkland was home to a vast wood, cut through with straight rides in a star shape by a previous generation. In one of the segments of the woodland Finch built a summerhouse in the form of a hermit’s abode. The floor was a mosaic of pebbles and the knucklebones of sheep, and featured a ‘W’ for Winchelsea and the date 1807, which is assumed to be the date of construction.

In 1858 a local newspaper described the Hermitage as ‘an object of interest and amusement’ and encouraged readers to walk the ‘narrow and meandering’ path through the woods to find the rustic cottage, which was built almost entirely of wood except for a huge chimney built of rough stones. There were two rooms – a bedroom with wooden bed and straw mattress covered with sacking, and a front parlour. The centrepiece of this room was a ‘huge block of wood’ which served as a table. The table was by that date already covered in graffiti, as the many visitors had carved their names or initials into the surface. Despite this vandalism, the Hermitage remained ‘constantly open for inspection’.

The same account introduces the first ‘history’ of the building. In brief, a man wanted by debt-collectors went into hiding in Burley Woods (he is not named in the report but locally he is remembered as a Mr Booth or a Mr Bennett). Being ‘sufficiently versed in construction’, he built the ‘humble tabernacle’ and only ventured out occasionally for provisions. Eventually, the bailiff found his secret hideout and tried to take him into custody, but the fugitive locked the bailiff in the hermitage and ran for it. The bailiff, being a stout man, was allegedly stuck in the cottage for days until rescuers found him, much to the amusement of the locals.

An alternative version of the tale has the lurid twist that the fugitive was in fact a murderer. To atone for his crime he sequestered himself in the woods and lived as a hermit, bound by oath not to speak to his fellow men. A short distance from the Hermitage was a smaller rustic shelter called Soloman’s Hut, and according to the legend this is where food was left for the hermit to collect.

Still more diabolical is the history recounted in 1911, which has an ancestor of the Finch family selling his soul to the devil. When Satan tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to keep his word, a deal was struck that the bond would be broken when a Finch had spent 7 years in solitary confinement in the Hermitage. Until this was accomplished the devil would retain his hold over the family. The report concluded that ‘within living memory’ one member of the family had managed two years of isolation before he ‘lost his reason’. Clearly the writer didn’t believe a word of the nonsense he was feeding to his readers, and he concludes with the anti-climactic ‘At any rate, it is a fact that there is at Burley to this day a Hermit’s cell’.

Barbara Jones described the Hermitage in the first edition of Follies and Grottoes in 1953. She thought it a ‘magnificent example’ of the hermitage genre of landscape buildings, and was amazed to find the interior intact. The furnishings included ‘three triangular stools of remarkable rustic discomfort’, and the vast table was still in situ. Her wonderful sketch shows just how intricate the fan-vaulted ceiling was, with branches for the ribs and huge elm bosses.

The Hermitage was visited by architect Neville Hawkes (1910-1988) in 1955 and his photograph shows that by that date the building was looking a little shabby and protected by a barbed-wire fence. Hawkes was probably accompanied on that visit by his son, William (1939-2024), and a year later William and a schoolmate returned to explore the building. Their status as pupils at the local public school of Uppingham gained them permission to visit the Hermitage, and for future historians this would be one of the best decisions the estate office ever made. Young Will, later to train as an architect, recorded the floorpan of the building in a lovely sketch.

Only six years after Will Hawkes visited, the Hermitage was set alight. On Thursday 5 July 1962 the Oakham firemen fought to save the structure, but it was totally destroyed (N.B. Barbara Jones gives the date 1965 which she was given in error by the estate office). A police investigation was launched, but it is unclear if the perpetrators were ever found and the blame is generally pinned on ‘schoolchildren’. The demise of the Hermitage caused great sorrow to an anonymous correspondent with the local paper. The writer remembered picknicking there with ‘the late Squire Finch’ and wished everyone to know that the ‘story of the Burley hermit is a myth’.

Today only a handful of photographs and sketches of the Hermitage survive to record its history, although visitors to the Rutland County Museum might see a miniature model of the building. It was made by local resident William H. Sewell, aka Billy Bennett (1912-1985). The exact date of the model is not known, but it shows the building much as Neville Hawkes saw it in 1955, with the chimney partially collapsed.

The Burley-on-the-Hill estate descended to the Hanbury family, and by the middle of the twentieth century the woods had been closed to the public (there’s an interlude when the estate is owned by the later-disgraced entrepreneur Asil Nadir that needs only the briefest of mentions here). The house was converted into houses by Kit Martin in the 1990s, but the parkland remains with the Hanburys who are currently planning to create an ‘immersive visitor attraction’ called Wild Rutland. Perhaps the Hermitage could be recreated – what could be more wild than a solitary hermit’s cottage?

The Rutland County Museum has a fascinating collection, although please note that the model of the hermitage is not currently on display. Visit before 4 October 2025 to see an exhibition of the works of the artist Rev J.L. Petit (1801-1868) of which the highlight for the present writer was, of course, this view of the folly known as Old John in Bradgate Park in Leicestershire.

Thank you for reading. As ever, your thoughts are very welcome. Please scroll down to find the comments box.