Tag: Penguin UK Books

architecture, Fictional Follies, Folly, Tower

Stark’s Folly and The Girl Who Wasn’t There

Posted on by Editor
Luna and Aurora explore the crumbling folly tower.

Follies occasionally appear in literature, but seldom in works aimed at a younger readership. So it was hugely exciting to find that one of Britain’s best-loved writers of children’s fiction had featured a folly in a recent work. This year, a new work by the acclaimed writer Dame Jacqueline Wilson (100 plus books and counting) was published. The Girl Who Wasn’t There is a ghost story within a tale of family life and is beautifully illustrated by Rachael Dean. The reader is only a few pages in when young Luna and Aurora are first introduced to the dilapidated Stark’s Folly, somewhere on the south coast of England…

architecture, eyecatcher, Folly, garden, garden history, Grotto, landscape, Surrey

The Grotto and Cottage Orné, Oatlands Park, Surrey, as seen by the novelist Denton Welch

Posted on by Editor

Denton Welch was a talented artist and writer, but his career was sadly cut short by his early death in 1948. A few years before he died he described an ornate 18th century grotto in one of his novels: the fabulous grotto was for real, but it was demolished in the same year that Welch died, making his description all the more poignant.

architecture, bridge, Buckinghamshire, Folly, garden, garden history, landscape, Temple

Mistress Masham’s Repose: a thinly disguised Stowe

Posted on by Editor
cc-by-sa/2.0 - © Dr Richard Murray - geograph.org.uk/p/886664

The rotunda at Stowe in Buckinghamshire was designed by Vanbrugh in around 1720, and stands on a sweeping lawn in front of the grand mansion. In the middle of the 20th century author T.H. White used a little artistic licence, and for the purposes of his story moved it to an island in one of the two lakes. There it became home to a colony of tiny people, and the adventure that is Mistress Masham’s Repose began.