Cothelstone was an ancient seat of the Stawel family. In the second half of the 18th century it was the property of Mary Stawel (1726-1780), the sole surviving direct descendant. In recognition of her ancient lineage, George III made her a baroness in her own right in 1760, with the title to pass to her sons from her first marriage to Henry Bilson Legge, Earl of Dartmouth. After the death of her first husband in 1764, Mary married Wills Hill, the Earl of Hillsborough (he would be created Marquess of Downshire after her death).

Sometime around 1770 Mary built a prospect tower in the park, which was known as Cothelstone Lodge. A correspondent with the Taunton Courier in 1899 quoted from a press cutting dated ‘around 120 years ago’ in which it was reported that ‘Lady Hillsborough has lately raised a small structure for the prospect’. This panorama was apparently the envy of the neighbourhood, and Lady Hillsborough is said to have declined the munificent proposal by ‘several gentleman of the county’ to knock down her tower and spend £2,000 on ‘something more conspicuous’. The architect of Lady Hillsborough’s unassuming little belvedere is not known, but the local artist and designer Richard Phelps (c.1710-1785), who designed the nearby hilltop towers at Dunster Castle and Willet Hill, seems a likely candidate – the two-stage buttress was certainly a feature he used.

In 1791 the Somerset historian Collinson described the lodge as ‘standing on a high hill justly celebrated for commanding one of the finest prospects in this part of the country’. Collinson reported that a total of 14 counties could be seen from the tower, and if equipped with a telescope it was possible to see 150 churches ‘on a clear day’. The panorama included the Vale of Taunton, Exmoor, the Quantocks and looked out over the Bristol Channel to Wales. It was sketched by Peter Orlando Hutchinson in 1833, at which date he described it as ‘ruinous’: the roof, door and windows were gone.

It was named as ‘Lodge’ on the county map produced by Day and Masters in 1782, and on the earliest Ordnance Survey map of 1802 as ‘Cotheleftone Lodge’. The title of lodge seems to have drifted out of fashion in the 19th century in favour of Cothelstone Tower or Cothelstone Beacon. Throughout the 19th century it was a landmark for the hunt, and a favoured destination for hikers and picnickers who, after exploring the hilltop tower, could enjoy the whortleberry jam and cream teas served at the lodge at the foot of the hill.

In 1913 the poet Edward Thomas saw the ‘blunt tower of a beacon’ on Cothelstone Hill, but he was one of the last to record the tower in situ. Towards the end of the First World War, the ‘people of Quantockland awoke to find their tower had collapsed and the skyline […] had changed overnight’. After the war there were discussions about where to place a Somerset war memorial, with the suggestion that £20,000 be expended on the project. A Captain Benson thought this a somewhat excessive figure and reported that people ‘in the western part of the county’ would prefer to see a little tower erected on the site of Cothelstone Lodge at a cost of £550. This plan never came to fruition, and today only a few stones mark the site.

The tower is a sad loss, but the hillside does have other attractions. As well as the truly astonishing panorama you might be lucky enough to meet some Exmoor ponies.

The manor house at Cothelstone is currently being renovated as a holiday let for large groups. Its setting is idyllic, and can be appreciated when visiting the delightful church of St Thomas of Canterbury.

There is a waymarked trail to the site of the tower from Cothelstone Hill car park https://www.cothelstonehill.org/things-to-do

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Near the hamlet of Blackborough in Devon’s Blackdown Hills, remnants of the local Whetstone mining industry can be found in the woodland. A battered pile of stones could be assumed to be another relic, but the more curious visitor will be intrigued to discover that it is marked on old maps as ‘Garnsey’s Tower’.

The Garnsey family had lived in the Uffculme area for centuries, and had a seat in the hamlet of Bodmiscombe. Exactly which member of the family built the tower is difficult to discover, and the ‘why’ and ‘when’ remain an only partially solved mystery. A 1938 newspaper report named the builder as John Garnsey, but there were at least three generations of John Garnseys in Uffculme throughout the 18th and well into the 19th century.

What is known for certain is that it was already in decay in 1854, when the polymath Peter Orlando Hutchinson (1810-1897) described it in his diary. On a walk from Uffculme he first visited the whetstone mines: here men dug deep into the hillside to extract the stone called Devonshire Batt, which was then shaped and smoothed and sold as whetstones for sharpening knives. Hutchinson then went on to ‘Garnsey’s Tower’, but his diary account makes it clear that he didn’t know the history of the building.

Hutchinson meticulously measured the diameter of tower, which was twelve feet, and wrote that it was three storeys in height. He was unable to climb it as the floors were ‘ruined and fallen down’. The windows had been blocked to strengthen the structure, but Hutchinson described it as ‘so tottering that it threatens to fall’. Happily, Hutchinson sketched it on the spot, and his watercolour is annotated with some extra information: the tower had fireplaces, suggesting that the Garnseys used the tower as a belvedere and place for refreshments.

Although Hutchinson could not climb the ruinous tower, he did describe the view from a nearby hill, and from that we can conclude that the panorama from the top of the tower would have included views of Dartmoor and the Quantocks, and stretched as far as the sea.

As the 20th century progressed the tower continued to crumble and today a stubby and characterless few courses of stone are all that survive.

Soon after Hutchinson sketched Garnsey’s Tower, he erected an ornament of his own in his Sidmouth garden in Devon. Appalled that sections of the parish church were to be pulled down, he purchased the stone and in 1859 re-erected it in his grounds of his house in Coburg Terrace. The ‘old chancel of Sidmouth church in miniature’ was originally home to Hutchinson’s museum and library, but he later incorporated it into a house, which still stands today. His ‘summerhouse in the tree’, recorded in his diaries, is sadly long gone.

Peter Orlando Hutchinson’s diaries and sketchbooks, which are in Devon Record Office (South West Heritage Trust), have been digitised (an admirable project) and are are hosted on the East Devon AONB website https://www.eastdevonaonb.org.uk/ourwork/projects/peter-orlando-hutchinson

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