In 1922 the writer and illustrator Charles George Harper penned a series of three articles about follies for The Architect magazine. Harper was a prolific author and had noted many follies as he toured the nation, often including them in his books on the topography of Britain. The articles were illustrated with his own vignettes of some of the buildings he admired (or censured). As for the foibles, which some may find a rather weak description of the eccentricities of Harper’s character, read on…

As ever in a feature on follies, the author had to deal with the question of a definition. Harper (1863-1943) concluded that a folly was a ‘pleasant fancy’ in the shape of a garden-house, a gazebo or perhaps even a ‘skyline freak’. As he continued, ‘now we have settled the nature of follies, the next thing will be to find some’. This, he thought, would be far from difficult, as the ‘land abounds with them’. Harper was sure that once a folly had been found, ‘the traveller who happens to be of a speculative turn of mind will find his curiosity greatly piqued to learn the story’.

Harper began with the building which he thought was ‘architecturally the most interesting’: the Triangular Lodge at Rushton in Northamptonshire. This was, he wrote, a building in which ‘Sir Thomas Tresham gave full outlet to his peculiar bent of mind’ by building a structure in which all measurements and decorations were governed by the ‘mystic three’.

In Cornwall Harper visited a ‘prime curiosity of the gruesome kind’ in the form of the mausoleum of Sir James Tillie. The monument was then derelict, but peering through a small gap the statue of Tillie could be seen – a ‘ferociously ugly man, with scowling countenance and great protruding paunch.’

Jack Fuller of Sussex (best known as Mad Jack Fuller) was described as ‘one of those squires who could not leave a hill-top alone in its natural beauty, but must needs place on it something in the way of a building, generally something ugly’. This was illustrated with a view of the Sugarloaf, supposedly erected to help Fuller win a bet that he could see Dallington church spire from his home. In fact he couldn’t, and the story goes that the cone was erected in a great hurry to ensure he won the wager.

William Beckford was noted as a man who frittered a fortune building towers, and an elegant sketch of his surviving tower in Bath was included in the article.

Harper was known for his strong opinions, and wasn’t afraid to air them in print. An anonymous review of his The Marches of Wales in The Athenaeum in 1895 noted how he went into ‘rhapsodies on discovering a Conservative cobbler’ but ‘shrieks against Dissenters, teetotallers and Radical politicians’. He was also accused of passing a ‘somewhat unjust judgment on the character of the Welsh people’.

To this list of pet hates might be added the women who were (to his mind) threatening the established order. In particular, Harper was no fan of the increasing numbers of female journalists who had ‘invaded newspaper offices’ and who were all more interested in the ‘cut of a dress’ than the ‘fall of a statesman from office’. He makes this sweeping statement in 1894, in a book that was a curious departure from his usual travelogues: Revolted Women: Past, Present and to Come. After what Harper called Eve’s ‘stupendous faux pas‘, he wondered why womanhood wasn’t content to ‘sit, for all time, humbly under correction, satisfied with her lot’ instead of aspiring to rule men while they had ‘no efficient control over [their] own hysterical being’.

But back to follies…

Harper also noted that not everything called a folly was actually a built structure with an interesting history. As an example, he gave the hilltop clump of trees in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) which had long been known as Faringdon Folly. One wonders what he made of the tower that Lord Berners erected on the summit only a decade or so later: no doubt it would have fallen into the ‘skyline freak’ category.

All of the follies mentioned are publicly accessible. Most have been covered in these pages – the search function will take you to the relevant posts.

Assuming she can control her own emotions (Harper didn’t think this possible of any females, especially writers) the Flâneuse will be back with another folly story next week. Thank you for reading.

In the early years of the 18th century Sir James Tillie updated his will and included a rather mysterious instruction about his last resting place. He was to be interred ‘in such a place at Pentillie Castle as I have acquainted my dearest Wife the Lady Elizabeth Tillie with.’

Shortly before his death Sir James (1645-1713) added a codicil to his will (it is not attached to the proven will in the National Archives, but is with the copy in Cornwall Record Office). He stated that he wished to be placed in a ‘Timber oake Chaire’, lined with crepe or flannel, in which he could ‘sit exactly fit Tight and Close’. He was then to be placed in a room in Pentillie Castle until a ‘Repository’ could be built to house his remains. He specified two spots on the estate: ‘Either on that Eminence called Mount Arraret or Pisgah’, with the former (nothing is known of the latter), a ‘finely wooded hill’, being chosen by his widow. Lady Tillie had also been instructed by her husband to erect a monument and inscription.

The earliest account to discuss the burial seems to be a manuscript history by the Cornish antiquarian William Hals, written sometime before 1737 and published posthumously in parts from 1750. Hals painted Tillie as a rogue and an atheist, and claimed to have it on very good authority that Tillie was buried in a seated position, finely dressed, and with his papers and pen set out before him, all encased in a wooden box or coffin. From Hals also came the story that Sir James was so sure of resurrection that he claimed he would be back at the castle within 2 years, and before long the story was also circulating that Tillie had instructed his servants to continue to bring meals to him after his death. All of this seems to be embellishment, and there is no mention of grand vestments, writing materials or daily dinners in Tillie’s comprehensive codicil.

William Gilpin, clergyman and promoter of the picturesque, perpetuated the story told by Hals in his Observations on the Western Parts of England, published in 1798. Gilpin’s text was then repeated, often verbatim, in a number of other publications in the next decades.

In fact Tillie’s burial was really only unconventional in that he was interred ‘by making an Arm’d chair and closeing up his body in it’, as a visitor in 1764 was told, rather than in the more usual prone position in a casket (although it was also still quite rare to build a mausoleum on a private estate rather than in the consecrated ground of a churchyard).

In 1810 the landscape gardener Humphry Repton created one of his famed Red Books for Pentillie. In it he proposed that the ‘small building’ on Mount Ararat be remodelled so that it might be appear to be an ‘isolated Tower of a ruined Castle’. Repton expert John Phibbs has suggested that the battlemented upper storey and the walled terrace were added at this date. This idea is backed up by earlier watercolours, which appear to show the mausoleum as a simple square tower.

The whole ensemble is shown in an engraving dated 1823:

For many years the mausoleum was in a neglected condition. The doorway was blocked up and only glimpses of the rather decayed and bramble-bound statue of Sir James were possible.

In 2013 a restoration was begun with the Pentillie Estate (seat of the Coryton family) receiving funding from Natural England and the Country Houses Foundation. As part of the project the Jessop Consultancy was commissioned to investigate the mausoleum, alongside Building Surveyor Richard Glover. Few records for the building of the mausoleum seem to have survived, although the (not always reliable) Cornish historian Sabine Baring-Gould wrote in his Cornish Characters & Strange Events that accounts for the construction survived, dated after Sir James had died and thus proving that the building was erected after his death. The site investigation however led the team to conclude that the mausoleum was a remodelling of an earlier tower or summerhouse.

Within the vault human remains were discovered along with pieces of wood with metal studs that spelled out Tillie’s initials and date of death. Enough remained of the decaying coffin for the specialists to confirm that he was indeed ‘placed in a wooden box […] but with a raised back section to imitate a chair’. Sir James’s remains were not disturbed, and the vault was resealed, but his statue was sent away for specialist restoration and then returned to the mausoleum, from where he continues to survey his domain.

Thanks to the team at Pentillie for welcoming the Folly Flâneuse and for the loan of the canine companions who guided us up the Lime Walk to the grade II* listed mausoleum.

Pentillie is now an events venue and there are holiday properties in the grounds. There are seasonal garden open days – check the website for 2023 dates in due course https://www.pentillie.co.uk

For more on Tillie see Stephen Tyrell Sir James Tillie: his Life, Houses and Eccentric Burial, Pasticcio (2016).

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