In November 1960, The Queen magazine published a special issue that asked the question ‘What’s so different about the British?’ Amongst the contributors were Norman Parkinson on ‘British Clothes’, Ambrose Heath on the British and cooking and Laurie Lee on the village of Slad. And what could be more British than follies, the subject discussed by Nicholas Guppy, and illustrated in wildly extravagant fashion by cartoonist ffolkes.

Guppy (1925-2012), writer, environmentalist and explorer, thought that ‘follies suit the British temperament’. He elaborated that there is ‘something light-hearted, whimsical and above all disorderly about many of them’ and concluded that they are ‘manifestations of eccentricity, and of rebellion’. Guppy’s article was entitled Follyphilia, the word he coined to describe those with an affectionate regard for such structures.

Some follies, thought Guppy, were built as ripostes to the ‘smug world of columned Palladianism’, (and he pointedly excluded classical garden ornaments from his article). His examples of such ‘crudely-made though often costly buildings’ included St David’s Ruin in Yorkshire, Dunstall Castle in Worcestershire and Arnos Castle near Bristol (pictured top in 1972).

‘…a crumbling edifice on the horizon’, he wrote, ‘inspired awesome thoughts about the vanity of earthly ambition, etc., or at least a fashionably genteel melancholy’.

Follies could provide an imaginary link with ‘a more heroic past’ in the form of a false-fronted cottage, a sham castle or abbey, a tower, or even an entire faux-druidical temple, such as the one near Masham in Yorkshire.

Then there were the towers that just soared higher and higher, often in a bid to outbuild the competition or to announce great wealth and position. Or, in the case of the one at Sway, to test the future of reinforced concrete in building towers.

Dank caves and subterranean passages like Sir Francis Dashwood’s at West Wycombe were too ‘curiously horrid’ for Guppy’s liking, but he did appreciate ‘gay affairs of glittering crystal-spar, of pearly shells and patterned pebbles’ such as the Shell House at Goodwood. Reaffirming his distaste for the Greco-Roman garden ornament he found the grotto at Stourhead ‘too classical’.

But for Guppy the ‘ultimate folly was the hermitage’, combining as it did the ‘picturesque features of a ruin and a grotto, the utmost eccentricity of building materials’ with a human inhabitant. Guppy gives the rustic shelter known as the Sanctuary of Hermit Finch at Burley-on-the-Hill, in Rutland, as his example, but sadly this folly was destroyed by fire in 1962, only a few years after this article was published.

The main image accompanying the article is of a structure that is unlikely to have ever graced a landscape. The cartoonist Michael ffolkes (1925-1988), conjured up a wonderful tower featuring elements of just about every British folly ever built (and a bowler-hatted Brit enjoying the view).

The article is illustrated with small black and white photographs of the follies, and no photographer is credited, so the Flâneuse has chosen to illustrate this post with better quality images of the same follies. All are roughly contemporary with the article, and all are from the Neville and William Hawkes Collection. Neville and William, father and son, were both architects and follyphiliacs, and Neville (1910-1988) took the views shown here at much the same time as Guppy was writing this article.

The Hawkes family donated the photographic archive to the Folly Fellowship, the charity which aims to to protect, preserve, and promote follies, grottoes & garden buildings, and the photographs are reproduced here by kind permission.

Dunstall Castle is in the park at Croome, a National Trust property; the Druid’s Temple on the Swinton estate is freely accessible as is Arnos Castle on the edge of Bristol. The tower at Sway is private, but can be seen from miles around.

If you find the folly illustrated by ffolkes please get in touch.

Thank you for reading. The Flâneuse is always delighted to learn more, or to hear your thoughts, so please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch. 

Wandering in the glorious landscape that is Stourhead in Wiltshire there are vistas to grand classical temples and gothic monuments, but there is also a pastoral scene featuring a pretty little rustic cottage which has inspired artists – from painters to designers of tourist souvenirs – over the centuries.

Stourhead, one of the most famous landscape gardens in Britain, probably needs little introduction here, but in brief it was created by the Hoare family in the eighteenth century. A grand lake is crossed by an elegant bridge, and a walk around the water leads to features including a grotto and classical temples as well as offering vistas to gothic ornaments and a sun-topped obelisk.

The cottage has been described by many names since it was first constructed in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a reference to Pantheon Cottage, and it is also mentioned as the Rustic Cottage or Arcadian Cottage. For many years it was called the Watch Cottage, most likely because it was home to a keeper, but it is now known as the Gothic Cottage. As the watercolour below shows, the picturesque little building was overgrown with creeping plants such as woodbine and clematis, commonly found in cottage gardens.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century the cottage was in frequent use as a summer retreat, with a comfortable sitting room for the ladies of the house. In this period the thatched roof was replaced with stone slates.

In 1946 the Hoare family gave the house and grounds to the National Trust, and the charity’s early guidebooks and maps called the rustic house the Watch Cottage.

The cottage was restored in 2007 and the roof covered with thatch to return it to its original appearance. The Folly Flâneuse dreams of living in such a rural retreat, but only after the crowds have gone home: in 2023-2024 over 370,000 visitors were able to wander around the lake and past the Gothic Cottage. But as an obsessive collector of all things folly, she can gaze upon it in various iterations from the comfort of her desk…

This little pottery model of the ‘Gothick Cottage’ was made for the National Trust by the Boncath Pottery in 1979. The design is by ‘Dorn Williams’ – Miss Dorn Williams produced other decorative and commemorative pieces for the National Trust.

In 1983 Ian Logan Ltd produced a series of tins featuring National Trust properties. Bill Dare produced the illustration used on this tin, which was ‘based on the Gothic Cottage, Stourhead’. Note that both the model above and this tin show the cottage with the slate roof that was in place at the time they were made.

Sometime towards the end of the 1980s the Flâneuse bought a ceramic model of the Gothic Cottage ‘in the tradition of the pastille burners made by the Staffordshire potters early in the nineteenth century’. It was made at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke on Trent, for a company called Recollections Ltd (the recollections of the Flâneuse stretch no further than that). Although the cottage is modelled with a thatched roof, this was acknowledged as artistic licence by the maker.

For more on Stourhead click here.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box if you wish to share any thoughts or further information. 

In 1981-82 the Royal Mail issued a set of stamp books featuring follies, and Richard Downer, an artist best known for the vast number of lovely line drawings he provided for the covers of Britain’s telephone directories, was commissioned to provided the illustrations. Of the six follies featured, five survive today and are very familiar to anyone with an interest in the subject, but one was relatively obscure, and has a rather interesting history.

Outside of post office opening hours, stamps could be bought from vending machines attached to the building. The stamp books had cardboard covers to protect the postage stamps, and these covers were often illustrated with subjects such as museums, period costumes and postal history.

Downer (born 1933) trained at Leeds College of Art. He then worked as an art director for an advertising agency, before setting up his own design consultancy. Alongside this work, he produced the drawings for the covers of telephone directories from 1967 to 1985, working initially for the GPO and continuing as the organisation became Post Office Telecommunications and then British Telecom. He liked to sketch on-the-spot, and was often an item of curiosity to passers-by. Many stopped to talk, and on one occasion Downer was aware of someone edging ever closer and peering over his shoulder at his sketch (it was his rule to chat, but never to look up from his work). Eventually the person spoke, asking ‘are you going to colour it in when you get home?’

Downer was commissioned in February 1981, and offered a fee of £750 for the six designs. The Post Office’s design team asked the National Trust to suggest folly subjects, and they replied with a copy of an article on ‘National Trust Follies’ which Barbara Jones had recently written for their members’ magazine.

The trust also sent a list of suggested follies which included Creech Arch in Dorset and the Temple of the Winds at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. The first was discarded, for reasons unknown, and the latter was replaced with the similar structure in County Down, presumably to ensure a good geographical spread. The National Trust properties of Paxton Tower, Mow Cop, Stourhead and Cliveden were all chosen to feature.

Things got rather complicated when a subject in Scotland was required. Downer had already visited what he thought was Mugdock Castle and sketched it for the cover of the Argyll and Lomond telephone directory, issued in 1976. Although it was later established, after some debate, that the building was actually in Stirlingshire, no-one spotted a further error and thousands of telephone directories were circulated ‘without a whisper of anything wrong’.

But Mr Arthur Brown of Southampton purchased a stamp book in August 1981, and noticed that the folly was wrongly named. Having explored the ancient Mugdock Castle as a youth he recognised the little tower, and wrote to the Chief Postmaster in Glasgow to point out that the building featured was not Mugdock Castle, but a nearby tower. The letter was forwarded to the Post Office HQ in London and the planning department of the Central Regional Council were consulted. They confirmed that ‘Mugdock Castle’ was an old fortification, and that the tower was a folly in the surrounding estate. But with the stamp books already in circulation there was little the Post Office could do, although it seems Mr Brown’s was the sole comment, as there is no further correspondence on file.

Locals know the little tower as ‘Smith’s Folly’ as it was built in the early 19th century by James Smith of Craigend. It was constructed ‘partly as an ornament to his grounds and partly for the sake of the splendid view’, and was described in 1922 as being 45-50 feet high, with a stone spiral staircase of ‘interesting construction’, although the writer did not elaborate on the design.

Sadly the tower was then allowed to become derelict. By 1975 the building was a shell, with only skeletal remains of the spiral staircase. This was the view sketched by Downer. Later, the upper storey was taken down, leaving only the ground floor with its gothic windows to be seen. Eventually this too was pulled down, leaving only a few courses of stonework.  In 2020 plans were submitted to rebuild the category C listed tower on new foundations, as part of a new semi-subterranean family home. Plans seem to have been withdrawn before the local authority’s decision process began.

Garden buildings have also appeared on an enchanting set of Swedish stamps issued in 2003. Here they are on the first-day cover:

And architect and designer Raymond McGrath created these stamps featuring Irish follies Dromoland Belvedere and Connolly Folly. They were issued in 1978, a year after his death. Do any philatelists out there know of more examples of follies featuring on stamps?

Update September 2022: Here is a stamp issued in 1993 as part of the Art in the 20th Century series. It features the pagoda at Kew Gardens, London

The genuine Mugdock Castle ruins, as well as the ruins of Smith’s Craigend Castle, are features of Mugdock Country Park https://www.mugdock-country-park.org.uk and the remains of the gazebo are nearby on private land.

More of Richard Downer’s work can be seen here http://drawingsoflondon.com/home.html

You can read about the garden buildings featured on the Swedish stamps here http://follies.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/ebulletin/Foll-e-49-Fem-Lusthusen.pdf

After her visit to the Postal Museum Archives the Folly Flâneuse had a great morning exploring the Postal Museum itself, including a trip on the redundant underground Mail Rail – highly recommended! https://www.postalmuseum.org

Thank you for reading. If you have enjoyed this post please share it with a friend who might be interested. And, comments are always welcome: please scroll down to the bottom of the page to share any thoughts.

‘Follies Can Be Fun’. So read the headline of an article in the Times in October 1959. But apparently not all follies: the anonymous author* dismissed sham ruins, grottoes and shell rooms, and expressed a preference for towers and columns. The Folly Flâneuse, who wholeheartedly agrees with the headline, thought it might be ‘fun’ to revisit some of the follies featured in the piece, to see how they had fared more than 60 years later.

The sub-heading ‘Hurt by a Mosquito’ was initially perplexing, until it was revealed that the Mosquito in question was an aircraft, and the hurt was inflicted on King Alfred’s Tower. The tall tower stands on the Stourhead estate (most of which is in Wiltshire, but the folly is just over the border into Somerset) and was built between 1762 and 1772 by Henry Hoare. A plane hit the tower in 1944, sadly with the loss of lives, although historians now dispute that the aircraft was a Mosquito. When the article was published the tower was closed to the public, but it is now restored to excellent condition and the tower can be climbed on open days.

Moving into Devon, the next folly to be discussed was Bishop Copleston’s Tower in Offwell, which is said to have been built in the mid 19th century to alleviate employment and to give the bishop a view across the Bristol Channel to his Welsh diocese. If the latter, the author noted drily, ‘there was a serious misjudgment about the height of the intervening hills’. He also left the reader to decide if the tower was best described as of ‘Italianate’ or ‘Victorian factory’ character (and one senses that neither was intended to be complimentary), although as the article was not illustrated it’s not clear how one would reach a conclusion. Ever happy to oblige, the Folly Flâneuse dropped by to take a photograph:

Clearly familiar with the follies of the South West, the author then succinctly described the prospect towers at Horton in Dorset (‘lonely in a field’), the Haldon Belvedere in Devon (‘high and eminent’), Beckford’s Tower in Bath (a ‘fantasy’), and poor old Cranmore Tower in Somerset (‘better to have been left as a distant tantalizing mystery than inspected’).

A move east into Hampshire brought the author to Luttrell’s Tower at Eaglehurst: ‘a fascinating example of an elegant habitable tower’. Built by Temple Simon Luttrell in the late 18th century, the tower remains both elegant and habitable thanks to the Landmark Trust, the charity which restored the folly as a holiday home.

Favoured columns were also largely in the South West of England, and particular mention was made of that at Burton Pynsent in Somerset. In 1959 the column was ‘permanently closed’ after a curious cow attempted the ascent and got stuck. It has since been restored, and there are occasional special openings when the column can be climbed.

Bringing the history of folly towers up to date, the writer visited the tower built by Lord Berners at Faringdon, then in Berkshire but now in Oxfordshire. Lord Berners’s folly was then only a little more than 20 years old, but, alas, it was found to be ‘locked against all comers’. Happily, the door is now regularly opened to visitors.

The article ends with the author pondering why owners of great estates were no longer building follies. Surely, he thought, a contemporary folly might ‘be erected as a popular attraction’. And in case any impoverished stately home owners are reading, and tutting to themselves about the potential costs, fear not, our writer has that covered: ‘And why not get the public to build it, by paying sixpence a brick for the privilege’.

So, more than 60 years later, the good news is that all of the buildings featured survive. Although only four were listed buildings when the article was written (including Luttrell’s Tower which was listed the day before the article appeared in print), each tower and column mentioned here is today protected by listed building status. And the article’s author, who bemoaned the lack of access to many of the follies, would be delighted to know that the vast majority are now open to visitors: the tower at Offwell is part of a private house, but is visible from the road, and all of the other follies can be visited or viewed at close range from a public footpath.

*Based on the close similarity to a Country Life article on ‘Tower Follies of the South’, published in June 1960, the Folly Flâneuse suspects the author was J.D.U. Ward, a writer, photographer and forestry expert.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts are more than welcome – there’s a comments box at the foot of the page.

When the great folly builders of the 17th and 18th centuries were erecting statement buildings on the high points of their estates, they can little have known how useful they would be to the Board of Ordnance. The ‘Principal Triangulation of Britain’ was a trigonometric survey, begun in the late 18th century, which by determining precise coordinates of significant landmarks would enable highly accurate mapping. The main landmarks used were church spires, but ‘other remarkable objects’ were picked, and in the first decade of the 19th century over 50 towers, temples, obelisks, summer houses and follies made it into this category.

Were a convenient church spire not available, the surveyors would occasionally have to make do. Thus two of the more unusual locations were ‘Chimney on the north side of Mr. Evered’s House’, and the rather vague sounding ‘Clump of Trees near the Flying Bull Inn’. They must therefore have been delighted to find an elevated folly from which to carry out their measuring. Of the many landscape ornaments used as ‘stations and intersected objects’, some are very familiar and would be obvious choices if asked to suggest lofty towers: King Alfred’s Tower at Stourhead, Sturt’s Folly in Dorset, and Leith Hill Tower in Surrey to name a few. Obelisks were also favoured: Bramham in Yorkshire, the Frampton Obelisk in Dorset, and the now truncated Norris’s Obelisk in Surrey, are just three that feature in the report. The word ‘obelisk’ was often applied to any tall, thin structure at this date, and so the ‘Earl’s Mount Obelisk’ is actually Robert Adam’s lovely Brizlee Tower at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland (as featured here last week https://thefollyflaneuse.com/brizlee-tower-alnwick-northumberland/).

Most intriguing to The Folly Flâneuse was a structure listed as ‘Justice Waller’s Pleasure House’. The context suggested it was in eastern Lancashire, and a little help from a friend* established that the coordinates led to Clerk Hill, between Whalley and Wiswell. This was the seat of James Whalley (1748-1805), one time High Sheriff of the county of Lancaster and a Justice of the Peace – hence ‘Justice Waller’. The incorrect spelling of his name may have something to do with local pronunciation: Whalley is pronounced Wall-ey. One of the earliest writers to mention the pleasure house made the same error; passing by in 1792 the Hon. John Byng grumbled that Mr Waller had ‘with miserable intention, built some strange ruins on a hill-top’. But then Byng, the most curmudgeonly of travellers, was seldom impressed.

James Whalley (Sir James from 1797 when he inherited the baronetcy from his brother) probably built the gothic folly in the 1780s after he moved to the Clerk Hill estate. Set in its extensive deer park, the folly was comprised of a two storey octagonal central tower linked by walls to flanking towers, forming a symmetrical composition. The battlemented central tower had an upper room for picnics and for watching the hunt, and the outer towers could only be reached by walking along the connecting walls. The whole had panoramic views across the valley of the River Ribble to Pendle Hill. Local legend says that some of the stone was taken from old beacons that formerly stood on the site, and the elevated site would certainly seem appropriate.

The tower was still largely intact in 1944, although the roof and the floor of the upper room had collapsed. A few years later the folly disappeared in a rather dramatic fashion. Late in September 1948 the 510 Squadron of the Royal Engineers of the Territorial Army, with the permission off the landowner, blew up the structure because it had become ‘dangerous’. The local parish council was indignant, but the landowner was completely within his rights: the folly was not scheduled, and he argued that as it was not marked as an antiquity on the Ordnance Survey map, it could not be considered to be of historical importance. The 1st edition map shows the building as ‘Castle’ in a circular plantation called ‘Castle Wood’, and the central tower is shown as the triangulation point used by the surveyors some 50 years earlier. By the 20th century the sham castle had become known as the ‘Baby House Towers’, presumably because of its likeness to a toy fort.

There may be some good news. When follydom’s dapper duo Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp published Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings in 1999, they reported that the then owner of Castle Wood was slowly rebuilding the towers. Does anyone know if he finished?

UPDATE: thanks to the Whalley Local History Group for confirmation that the circular bases are extant on private land, but the towers were never completely rebuilt.

So the moral of this post is ‘never judge a book by its title’. Who would have thought that An Account Of The Trigonometrical Survey, carried on by Order of The Master General of His Majesty’s Ordnance, in the Years 1800, 1801, 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, 1807, 1808, and 1809 could provide so much fascinating material?

*thank you Harry Beamish

The images are from the wonderful resource that is Lancashire County Council’s Red Rose Collection, which contains images of Lancashire people, places and events https://redrosecollections.lancashire.gov.uk/

In the 1760s Sir Thomas Wentworth* (1726-1792) of Bretton Hall, near Wakefield, set about landscaping his park. Initially, he employed Richard Woods, a professional landscape designer, but soon decided he could manage just as well on his own. In the 1770s he added to his grand design without recourse to even the most eminent landscaper of the age: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. A second lake would, he told friends, be completed without the help of ‘Capability or any such pretending Rogues’.

In 1769 the first lake was embellished with an island on which Sir Thomas built ‘a little Gothic Temple … where a dozen might be sociable’, shown here in a sketch by the itinerant artist and drawing master J.C. Nattes. The Temple was the centrepiece when Sir Thomas threw a grand party in 1771. A ‘genteel cold collation’ was served at the building, which was illuminated with lamps. As guests sailed up the lake in Sir Thomas’s boat, The Aurora, a band played, fireworks were set off and a huge bonfire blazed at the end of the lake.

Although Sir Thomas described the temple as gothic it had in fact two facades, one gothic and one with a pediment. This classical front is known only from another sketch by Nattes in the collection of the National Trust at Stourhead. The architect was probably John Carr of York.

Sir Thomas wrote that he intended to dedicate the temple to Bacchus, god of wine, and Venus, goddess of love, and planned to erect statues of the two deities on the island . The building housed a pantry and kitchen and a bedroom above; the former presumably the haunt of Bacchus and the latter the domain of Venus. The baronet was a rake, who vowed never to marry, but kept a mistress and, in the manner of the age, exercised his droit de seigneur. He fathered a number of children, four of whom lived in his household and were accepted by polite society.

If only Sir Thomas had crossed paths with the French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1826) he might have been tempted to build a more daring structure in which to conduct his dalliances. The Folly Flâneuse was very sorry to miss a recent exhibition in Paris which featured Lequeu’s exotic output. Sir Thomas might have been tempted by this garden pavilion with its ‘Hammock of Love’, complete with ecstatic couple.

There’s more on all of Lequeu’s erections here https://gallica.bnf.fr/html/und/images/jean-jacques-lequeu

Already ruinous when it was photographed by Country Life in 1938, the temple at Bretton was demolished as unsafe after the mansion became a college in the later decades of the 19th century. The park at Bretton is now home to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park https://ysp.org.uk and the mansion is currently being restored as a hotel http://www.rushbond.co.uk/our-projects/bretton-hall-estate-wakefield/

*He took the name Blackett in 1777.