In the middle of the 18th century the Earl of Strafford was embellishing his seat at Wentworth Castle near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. A new wing was added to the mansion and the grounds were decorated with temples, columns and garden seats. Strafford asked his lifelong friend Horace Walpole for advice on an ornament for his menagerie, and this little gothic temple was the result.

The Menagerie, or Menagery, at Wentworth Castle (historically also known as Stainborough) was already well-established when Walpole was consulted. A substantial building, completed in 1717, provided a home for the keeper who looked after the ornamental birds and also provided a space for refreshments when Lord Strafford was taking his guests for tours of the park and gardens. In April 1738 ‘two good fires’ warmed a party who had been out exploring the estate, and an inventory of a few years later shows that the Menagerie House had a settee and cups and saucers for tea.

The menagerie grounds included ponds and cascades as well as homes for the birds (there is no evidence of any other animals). In 1771 there were ornamental pheasants but a poem of 1731 shows that there was an avian presence 40 years before that:

From thence with Pleasure you may see
Strange Birds at the Menagerie,
Some Squeek, Some Cry – Some Sing, Some Squall,
Whose echo Sounds unto the hall;

In 1739 William Wentworth (1722-1791) succeeded his father as 2nd Earl of Strafford of the 2nd creation. Two years later he married Lady Anne Campbell (1720-1785) and the couple’s social circle included Horace Walpole (1717-1797), creator of the gothic delight called Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. When his friends asked him to design a building for the menagerie, Walpole suggested a structure ‘in the manner of an ancient market cross’, and in particular that at Chichester in Sussex.

In 1756 Walpole’s friend Richard Bentley (1708-1782), a fellow member of the self-styled Committee of Taste based at Strawberry Hill, produced a drawing for Strafford’s masons and construction of the temple began soon after.

The menagerie was Lady Anne Strafford’s domain, and her passion for the peacocks and ornamental pheasants in the grounds led Walpole (who revered Anne as both a beauty and a wit) to refer to her as ‘the lady of the menagerie’.

Walpole visited in August 1760 to see the finished work and he admired the situation of the temple ‘on a high bank in the menagerie, between a pond and a vale, totally bowered over with oaks’. Walpole’s role in the design must have been pointed out to visitors as a traveller in 1761 noted ‘the Elegant Gothic temple designed by Mr Horace Walpole’.

Whilst Wentworth Castle was very much on the 18th century ‘tourist trail’, and is mentioned in countless travel journals, there are very few accounts of the little temple, but Arthur Young wrote a good account in 1771. He walked across a grass lawn overhung with oaks to find ‘a Gothic temple, over a little grot, which forms an arch, and together have a most pleasing effect’. Behind it was a piece of water with an island and the banks were ‘prettily planted’. The history of the chamber underneath the temple is not clear – it is not mentioned in Walpole’s correspondence and possibly pre-dates the building of the temple.

A little guidebook with the comprehensive title of Stainborough & Rockley, their Historical Associations, and Rural Attractions was published in 1853 (this is the source of the title image). By then the Menagerie wore ‘an air of neglect’ and the shrubs and trees had run wild. Some ‘traces of its former beauty’ were still visible and these included the piece of water and the gothic temple ‘on an elevated basement’, which was ‘beautifully artistic, and of elaborate character’.

Wentworth Castle featured in Country Life in 1924 when the magazine’s Architectural Editor H. Avray Tipping described the feature as ‘somewhat ruinous’, although he was referring in particular to the grotto chamber rather than the ‘mock-mediaeval frippery’ of the temple itself. During the Second World War troops were stationed at Wentworth Castle and the story goes that the temple was used for target practice.

Barbara Jones went to see the temple when she was researching for the first edition of Follies & Grottoes, published in 1953. She described the ‘little summerhouse’ as being ‘of the very best mid-eighteenth century gothic’, and she was saddened to learn that the building had been intact until the Second World War. When she saw it in the decade after the war the elegant pinnacles were gone – ‘wanton destruction’ was her conclusion. By the time the revised edition of her book was published in 1974 the temple was ‘only rubble’. Nikolaus Pevsner called the temple ‘the umbrello’ in the 1959 1st edition of The Buildings of England: Yorkshire the West Riding, and that name seems to have been adopted from that date.

The stone fragments were recorded by the National Monuments Record in 1965 and nature then covered over the remains. In 2006 Archaeological Services WYAS were commissioned to survey the collapsed structure. Happily, the masonry was found to be largely extant, and we can hope that one day the funds might be found to enable a restoration.

Much restoration work has already taken place under the auspices of the Wentworth Castle and Stainborough Castle Heritage Trust which was established in 2001. The site of the Gothic temple is not publicly accessible but a sham castle, temples, obelisks, a column and extensive gardens make a visit to Wentworth Castle (not to be confused with neighbouring Wentworth Woodhouse) more than worthwhile. The house is home to the Northern College but opens for monthly tours. In 2018 the National Trust took over the management of the gardens and park https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/yorkshire/wentworth-castle-gardens

No feature on Wentworth Castle is complete without a mention of the pioneering research of Dr Patrick Eyres and Dr Michael Charlesworth: their work is gratefully acknowledged.

Thanks for reading. To share any thoughts please scroll down to the comments box at the bottom of the page. If you are new to this site and would like to receive a folly story in your inbox each week please click the subscribe button.

In 1752 Richard Trevor became the new Bishop of Durham. A perk of the post was two palaces: one in the city and a country seat at Auckland Castle, on the edge of the town of Bishop Auckland. In around 1760 he erected there this gorgeous gothic Deer House in the park at Auckland. As is so often the case with garden buildings, it combined the functional with the frivolous –  as well as sheltering the herd it also provided a banqueting room with extensive views and served as an eye-catcher in the park.

The Deer House was built on high ground above the River Gaunless, a tributary of the Wear, which meanders in an extremely pretty manner through the park (genuinely useless fact – Gaunless is apparently old Norse for useless). Trevor’s predecessor had already begun to remodel the park, a project that the new incumbent was happy to continue. Bishop Trevor (1707-1771) was a great builder, having remodelled his family seat at Glynde in East Sussex, and built a new church there.

At Auckland Castle he commissioned plans for entrances and garden buildings from the gentlemen-architects Richard Bentley and Sir Thomas Robinson, but the designer of the Deer House is thought, on stylistic grounds, to be Thomas Wright (1711-1786), the polymath who was born and died in County Durham. The Reverend James Raine, in his A brief historical account of the episcopal castle, or palace, of Auckland, published in 1852, gives the date as 1760. Raine also wrote that the ‘winter shelter’ was said to have cost £379, but sadly he gives no information on the architect. Other sources give the date as 1767, which may be when the works were completed.

The Deer Shelter, high on an eminence in the park, was thought ‘well plac’d’ by a visitor in 1766, and the grand scale of the building (‘very commodious’) was noted by another tourist in 1775 . The historian of Durham, William Hutchinson, described it in 1794 as a ‘well-fancied erection, in form of a cloister’. Sadly no accounts of enjoying a repast in the tower, with a vista across to the castle, have been found.

But half a century later fashions had changed, and the building failed to impress one visitor who though it ‘a piece of bad taste […] a sham with no reasonable motive’. Raine also expressed some doubt about the Deer Shelter: he thought it had a good effect from a distance, but did not stand up to closer scrutiny by an ‘architectural eye’. The Folly Flâneuse is firmly with the 18th century admirers.

There had been deer in the park at Auckland for centuries. The keeping of a herd fell in and out of fashion over the years, and the park needed to be restocked on a number of occasions. Bishop Trevor was seeking to increase the herd soon after arriving in Durham, and his steward was tasked to find an estate with deer to spare. But in 1856 The Gateshead Observer reported that the ‘episcopal deer’ had been sold by the ‘economical Church Commissioners’, and that some of them had already been shot & sent off to the London market. The paper was saddened by this move, writing that ‘the romance of the Church is fast disappearing’. A century later the now redundant Deer Shelter was taken into the care of the state to ensure its future was safe.

Early this century the Church Commissioners were once more criticised when they announced plans to sell off a number of Bishop’s Palaces, stating that they were too expensive to maintain, and unfit for 21st century episcopal life. Auckland Castle was on the list, and there was very vocal opposition, but a saviour was on hand in the form of Jonathan Ruffer, a hedge-fund manager. In 2012 he bought the estate and established a trust to save the castle and park, and to help reinvigorate the town of Bishop Auckland. Since that date Heritage Lottery Funding has enabled The Auckland Project to develop new museums and attractions, creating jobs and attracting visitors to the town.

The deer park is currently open for local visitors only. The Auckland Project is scheduled to reopen in June and should definitely be on your list of things to look forward to https://www.aucklandproject.org

And whilst discussing the follies of County Durham there is the excellent news that the updated The Buildings of England (Pevsner) volume on the county is published this month (March 2021). Fully updated by Martin Roberts, this will be a real treasure trove of information. And the icing on the cake? County Durham’s extraordinary eyecatcher, the Penshaw Monument, is on the cover.

You can find out more about the book here https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300225044 And the Paul Mellon Centre is hosting a virtual launch, details here https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/forthcoming/pevsner-county-durham