Most of the structures featured in these pages decorate vast estates or landscapes, or at least substantial gardens. But the sculpture pictured here is something a little different – it started life as a project for men building a reservoir, and later spent many years ornamenting a quiet garden in a Yorkshire village. It is a scale model of the dam and valve tower at Angram Reservoir, north of Pateley Bridge in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, and was built by two of the masons who worked on the construction of the reservoir.

Angram was one of a string of reservoirs built in remote spots along the course of the river Nidd in the early years of the twentieth century. The water was to supply the prosperous city of Bradford: by constructing the reservoirs on high ground, gravity would allow the water to flow to the treatment works on the edge of the city without the need of pumps.

The model was made by the father and son team of Robert Drummond (1844-1920) and his son Duncan (1883-1942) whenever they had some spare time. The 1911 census shows that both men lived with their wives and families on site at Angram, in the specially-constructed ‘temporary village’ for workers constructing the reservoir and massive stone dam.

Although there was a reading and recreation room on site, there must have been little to do in such a ‘wild, solitary spot’, and construction of the scale replica kept the men busy when not at work.

The model was first erected on land near where the Drummonds lived in the temporary housing shown in the background of the photograph above (which the workers christened ‘Angram Terrace’). According to the date stone it was completed in 1913, although the tower on the actual dam carries the date 1916.

The village was cleared when work on the reservoir was complete. The model was then moved to stand outside Bradford Corporation’s Water Works at Chellow Heights, but was threatened with destruction when the works were modernised in the 1970s. It was rescued by the Drummond family and moved to the garden of one of the family in East Morton, near Keighley in West Yorkshire.

There it remained for many years until the house was to be sold, and a new home for the model was required. Robert and Duncan Drummond’s descendants approached the Nidderdale Museum, in Pateley Bridge, to ask if they might find some space to display it: the museum is the perfect home as it already tells the history of the building of the reservoirs. With financial support from Yorkshire Water, the model was restored by monumental masons H.A. Green of Ripon, and moved to stand outside the museum. In summer 2023 the Lord Mayor of Bradford, performed the ceremony to welcome what is now known as the Angram Monument to Pateley Bridge.

In 1921 work began to construct Scar House, an even larger reservoir further down the valley (where Duncan Drummond was also employed). The Chairman of Bradford Council’s Waterworks Committee was Lt Colonel Anthony Gadie, and not everyone supported his decision to invest so much money in the reservoirs. Scar House Reservoir became known as Gadie’s Folly, but Bradford’s naysayers were forced to eat (or rather drink) their words when the city had ample water in periods of drought later in the century. The reservoirs continue to serve the people of Bradford and district today.

There is a circular walk to Angram and Scar Top reservoirs from the Yorkshire Water car park near the village of Lofthouse.

Visit the Nidderdale Museum in Pateley Bridge to learn about the construction of the reservoirs (and much more).

Thank you for reading, and as ever do please get in touch to share any thoughts or further information.

High above the town of Pateley Bridge in Nidderdale stand two strange stone pillars which look like the remnants of some ancient ecclesiastical edifice. Until 1893 there was a third, and they were known as the Three Stoops, or alternatively as Yorke’s Folly after their begetter, John Yorke. They are often dated to around 1800, but they are actually some decades earlier, being constructed at the height of the Georgian vogue for mock ruins and eye-catchers.

Yorke (1733-1813) first considered building an eye-catcher on Guyscliffe, to be seen from his house at Bewerley in the valley below, in 1768*, the year in which he succeeded his father. The sham ruin’s gothic form may have been suggested by Bewerley having once housed a grange serving the monks of Fountains Abbey, which stands only a few miles away. The folly was complete by 1779 when a lady touring Nidderdale admired the ‘beautiful wooded hill crown’d with cliffs’. But she was not impressed with the folly, and complained that Mr Yorke had expended £300 on ‘a most wretched imitation of a Ruin’. Perhaps she might have felt differently if she knew that this was not just a gentleman’s whim, but a philanthropic enterprise to help the poor of the district.

Writing in Follies & Grottoes in 1953, Barbara Jones noted that unemployed men from the neighbourhood were recruited to build the folly in return for 4d a day and a loaf of bread. Jones gives no source for this story, but an account written in the early years of the 19th century, during Yorke’s lifetime, corroborates her account. On seeing the folly in 1805, Charles Fothergill was delighted to learn of Yorke’s benevolence and described him as a ‘gentleman of ancient family and very good fortune, perhaps not less than £20,000 per annum; the greater part of this sum he regularly expends in ameliorating the condition of the indigent poor and sick’.

Yorke died in 1813, and by his request was quietly buried in Hudswell churchyard, close to his other family seat in Richmond, Yorkshire, where his gravestone has a simple inscription, free from encomiums. But others praised his ‘charity and benevolence’: the Leeds Mercury reported that he was ‘universally lamented’ and the Richmond historian Clarkson wrote that ‘the poor have lost in him their most bountiful benefactor’.

In November 1893 a storm hit Pateley Bridge, and the third (and most substantial) stoop was ‘blown down’. The Pateley Bridge and Nidderldale Herald reported that it was surprising that the folly had survived so long in its exposed position, and with a nice understanding of the picturesque noted that the stoops ‘so interestingly break the monotony of the edge of Nought Moor’. The collapse of the third stoop was remembered in the Yorkshire Post in 1929, and a Yorke descendant wrote to the paper with the pessimistic premonition that ‘doubtless the last two will, in time, share the same fate’.

Happily he was wrong, and although ambitious plans to rebuild the third stoop as a millennium project came to nothing, the Two Stoops remain a dramatic landmark, and the grade II listed folly is a popular resting spot for friendly ramblers enjoying a panorama of Nidderdale.

If you plan to visit Yorke’s Folly, allow time to explore the Nidderdale Museum in Pateley Bridge and support the volunteers who keep it flourishing  https://www.nidderdalemuseum.com

* This very useful reference is from Margaret Hadley Watersons’s From Folly to Flower Garden: The Yorkes in Nidderdale (2015) which is on sale at the museum.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts are always welcome and can be shared via the comments box at the bottom of the page.