Just over the river Ure from the market town of Masham is this unusual rotunda sitting on top of a rustic grotto. It was designed to take advantage of the view over the river to the church and the attractive little town. An engraved stone near the temple tells us that in 1770 ‘Samuel Wrather built this grotto’.

Samuel Wrather (1727-1806) was a wool-stapler of Masham. In 1773 he married Miss Spence, a ‘young lady of merit and fortune’, and he died in 1806 ‘at an advanced age universally respected’. He was succeeded by his son, Samuel junior (c.1778-1854), who is best known today as the owner of Nutwith, the champion racehorse bred by his late brother, which won the St Leger in 1843. The family had a small estate at Beggars Bush, in nearby Grewelthorpe, and also owned property in Masham town.

The early history of the Grotto Temple is unclear, and apart from the stone near the building there is little to go on. Late 18th century maps show that Samuel Wrather owned the strip of land now called Grotto Plantation, but the Grotto Temple itself is not marked.

The earliest image of the Grotto Temple found to date shows it as the property of Samuel Wrather junior. An engraving after a sketch by the artist George Cuitt (1779-1854), who moved to Masham in 1821, was made in 1837. It was published a year later in a fashionable pocket diary called Le Souvenir, or Pocket Tablet and captioned ‘Temple in the Grounds of S. Wrather, Masham’.

The 1st edition Ordnance Survey map, published in 1859, shows the structure as ‘Pavilion’, within woodland called ‘Grotto Plantation’. At that date there was no house nearby, suggesting that this was a detached pleasure ground (another unnamed building and bridges over a stream can be seen on the map), perhaps to be visited by the ferry which crossed the river not far away. There was certainly inspiration nearby: Hackfall, the famed woodland landscape with buildings created by William Aislabie of Studley in the 1750s and 60s, did not have a principal house attached and is only a short distance away.

A rare lithograph of the pavilion, of which only one copy has been traced, attests to its lost fame. It was published by C. M. Dydynski in around 1850 and was inserted into an extra-illustrated copy of Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s Richmondshire in the collection of Leeds Libraries. Extra-illustration, or Grangerisation, was a fashionable hobby in which prints and original sketches were interleaved into a text to enhance the content. The process took its name from the clergyman and print collector James Granger (1723-1776) who published a biographical history and encouraged readers to embellish it with engraved portraits of his subjects.

The Grotto Temple then featured on a number of picture postcards which were probably produced for the tourists who arrived after the opening of the branch line to Masham in 1875: visitors would have passed the grotto grounds on their way from the station to the town.

Sometime between 1890 and 1905, a house was built which took its name from the existing pleasure grounds: ‘The Grotto’. In the 1910s it was home to Arthur Atkinson, a haulage contractor, but by 1921 it had been renamed ‘The Greens’ and was home to the Burrill family. The engraved stone by the pavilion records that Edward Burrill restored the Grotto Temple in 1935, perhaps in preparation for the wedding of his daughter Lucy in 1936, when the reception was held at The Greens.

A fleeting mention of the ‘grotto in the plantation’ can be found in local novelist and writer Mary Elizabeth Stevenson’s guide to Masham, published in 1919. On Summer Roads in Mashamshire suggests rambles for the visitor to the area, including a walk from Masham town over the bridge towards the weir (since destroyed) to appreciate the views of the church from across the river.

Mrs Stevenson (1853-1935)  introduces the interesting idea that the grotto was a favoured viewpoint of the artist Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817), who settled in Masham in 1805. Stevenson wrote that Ibbetson painted ‘many fine views of the Church from this side [of the river]’, and this 1816 view certainly looks to have been taken from within the Grotto Plantation (Stevenson would have known the history of this painting, for it had hung above the fireplace in her childhood home overlooking the Market Place in Masham). The Ibbetson and Wrather families were friends, and in September 1813 they and a party of friends spent a day sketching before partaking of ‘tea and syllabub’ at Wrather’s Beggars Bush home.

Sadly the current condition gives great cause for concern: the pavilion’s pretty roof, with its wide overhanging eaves, has fallen and the grotto is overgrown. The structure is not listed and therefore has little protection, an omission that should be rectified urgently.

Grotto Plantation is private property and there is no public access, but the Grotto Temple can be seen through the trees from a public footpath.

Huge thanks to Alison Brayshaw and Gail Falkingham for their help in compiling the history of the Grotto Pavilion. There are still gaps in our knowledge – do get in touch if you can help.

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