Horton Tower, also known as Sturt’s Folly, is one of those enigmatic erections whose history is vague and usually explained in sentences that begin ‘said to have been…’. What is not in question is its magnificence: seven stories of red brick soaring skywards in the middle of a field. 

Many sources will tell you it was built in 1750, a few give a date of 1700, and Pevsner amongst others says 1726. All are agreed that it was built by Humphrey Sturt, but just to complicated matters there was a Humphrey Sturt senior (1687-1740), and his son Humphrey Sturt junior (1724-1786).

The tower was there by 1765 when ‘Horton Observatory’ was marked on Taylor’s Map of Dorset, published in that year, and a coloured vignette appeared on the 1795 edition of the map (above). Over the next couple of decades it is mentioned by the occasional tourist who passed by, but seldom with any further detail. The only account that gives any description is that of the historian Edward Gibbon: he saw the tower in 1762 and admired the ‘elegant turret 140 feet high’, but complained that the estate was in ‘no order’, and the tower used as a granary.

It seems unlikely that Humphrey Sturt junior would neglect such a wonderful tower only a decade or so after building it, so 1750 seems wrong, and it is equally unlikely that Humphrey Sturt senior built a tower when he was 13, so by deduction 1726 seems the most likely date, although the source for that date remains elusive. Thomas Archer has been suggested as the architect, but again evidence seems hard to find. What we do know is that the vast tower quickly became known as ‘Sturt’s Folly’.

One local story is that Sturt built the tower to overlook the Earl of Shaftesbury’s adjacent estate at Wimborne, the two men being said to be ‘at variance’. If there is any truth in this tale, then the Ashley-Cooper family must have secretly admired the lofty building, for they bought Sturt’s estate in the late 18th century and left the tower standing.

This is prime hunting country, and the tower would have been used to view the hunt and take refreshments, as well as being an ornament to Sturt’s deer park, which also featured a large piece of water (now lost). At the end of the 18th century the folly was put to a very different use by the Royal Ordnance: lofty towers across the country were used for the huge trigonometrical survey that allowed highly accurate maps to be produced. As the 19th century progressed the tower remained a focus for the hunt, with the East Dorset Hounds and other packs meeting at the building.

By the start of the 20th century the building was falling into disrepair, and falling out of fashion. In 1906 Sir Frederick Treves published a celebration of his birth county called Highways and Byways in Dorset. Treves was better known as a surgeon specialising in appendectomy, and is credited with saving the life of Edward VII in 1902. It seems fair to say that he would have liked to remove Sturt’s Folly, as he described it thus: ‘The only blot on the landscape is the nightmare tower of Horton, built for an observatory, and now happily falling into decay.’

In January 1947 the National Trust’s James Lees-Milne and Eardley Knollys went to look at the tower at the request of the Earl and Countess of Shaftesbury, who wished the charity to take on the care of the tower.  ‘Only a calcined beam or two’ was left of the interior, and concluding it was ‘rather ugly’, the pair concluded that it was ‘best not to accept it’.

The tower soon shrugged off this insult, and found a new role as a film star. In 1967 it featured in the film adaptation of Dorset boy Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Sergeant Troy (a rather dashing Terence Stamp) is filmed galloping away across the field with the tower as a dramatic backdrop. Hardy would have known the tower, as he lived in nearby Wimborne Minster for two years. In that period he wrote Two on a Tower, in which the protagonists fall in love as they watch the stars from the top of  ‘a tower in the form of a classical column’. Horton Tower has been suggested as a model, but scholars have found evidence in his papers that the ‘two real spots’, which inspired Hardy, were the tower at Charborough Park, and the monument to Admiral Hardy on Black Down, both in Dorset.

Hardy would have sympathised with the difficulty in establishing a correct history for Horton Tower, as he was aware that historians couldn’t always agree. In Two on a Tower he described the mount on which his fictional tower stands: ‘The fir-shrouded hill-top was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman Camp, – if it were not (as others insisted) an old English Castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field…’

Despite a grade II* listing in 1955, the tower continued to decay, and when it was described in the 1975 Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, it was as an empty shell.

In 1990 the tower was offered for sale, with the story being picked up by newspapers across the country (thanks to its lasting fame from the film role). An unexpected saviour appeared in 1991, when Vodafone was granted permission to use the tower as a transmission mast for mobile phone signal. As part of the deal the company consolidated the tower, and the conservation project was recognised with a Royal Town Planning Institute award in January 1995. The tower remains home to the transmitters, and is regularly upgraded.

The tower can be seen from miles around, but for a close-up try the adjacent public footpath.

View more of Christopher Gee’s work here https://christophergeepaintings.com

You can see John Piper’s mixed media view of the tower here https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/piper/horton-tower-dorset-1942-mixed-media/nomedium/asset/34203

You can see John Piper’s photographs of the tower here https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-8728-1-10-40/piper-photograph-of-horton-tower-in-dorset

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For centuries tall towers have been used for communicating: first via flags, beacons and semaphore, and then later by radio waves. In the late 20th century came the rapid expansion of mobile phone technology, with the service providers keen to find lofty locations to mount masts. Most are a simple metal pylon, whilst others are disguised (with varying degrees of success) as trees. And some have found a home in a folly – ancient or modern.

Horton Tower in Dorset, was built by Humphrey Sturt in 1750 as a belvedere. It stands 43m tall and the very fine tower is listed at grade II*. Vodafone paid for some restoration work when they installed masts in the early 1990s.

The Saxonbury Tower on the Eridge Park Estate in Kent was restored in the last years of the 20th century as part of a deal to install One2One equipment. The tower was built in 1828 and is grade II listed.

But what if a such a convenient folly tower was not available? Elevated sites which had once been home to Royal Observer Corps posts were also a popular choice of site. The posts were used for monitoring nuclear activity during the Cold War, and became redundant when the R.O.C. was stood down in the 1990s.

One such site was at Inkberrow, in Worcestershire, where an observer post had been built in 1962. In 1995 Mercury Communications approached Gabby Allison, who owned the field in which the remains of the post stood, and asked permission to build a mobile phone mast. Mercury sent Mrs Allison a design showing a bog-standard metal pylon, and unimpressed she countered with a sketch of a folly tower, which she thought would be more suitable as an object in the landscape. To their great credit, Mercury thought this was a wonderful idea: their draughtsman turned Mrs Allison’s sketch into a formal design, and Inkberrow Folly was born.

Not everyone agreed that a folly was an asset to the area, and there was some opposition to the structure. The local planning department was baffled, calling it ‘a most unusual proposal.’ For a brief period the tower became known as Moone’s Folly in ‘honour’ of a councillor who was initially against the scheme; happily, he came to appreciate the idea of creating a landmark, and planning permission was granted by Wychavon District Council. In November 1995 the remains of the observatory were demolished and work began to erect the tower. The scaffolding came down in spring 1996, revealing the new folly. Again, top marks to Mercury, because the tower is constructed of a mellow brick, with a lovely detail around the blocked windows that could so easily have been plain to cut costs. There are great views of the eye-catcher tower as one approaches the village, and only at close range do the masts on the turrets become obvious. The tower looks as if it has been there for centuries, and as technology inevitably moves on, the tower will hopefully stand long after its usefulness as a mast is over.

Mercury Communications are no more, but their name lives on in the Mercury Music Prize (now Hyundai Mercury Music Prize), which they supported from its launch in 1992. In 1996, when the folly tower was unveiled, the winner of the prize was Pulp with their album Different Class, which title also sums up this particular ‘phone mast.

More recently, Vodafone planned a new tower to be built on the Rushmore estate in Wiltshire, home to William Gronow-Davis. When the mobile phone company pulled out of the deal, Gronow-Davis decided to build it anyway as an eye-catcher from the mansion. He thus follows in a family tradition of folly building, as he is descended from General Pitt Rivers who created the Larmer Tree Gardens on the Rushmore estate in the 19th century. Designed by Walshe Associates, the tower was completed in 2009, and Gronow-Davis thinks ‘it is wonderful and just finishes the garden off’.

All of the follies featured here are on private land – but their elevated position means that they are visible from roads and public footpaths.

Huge thanks to Gabby Allison for showing The Folly Flâneuse the tower on the wettest of days, and getting soaked to the skin in the process. Just look at the sky in the photo’s…

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions or thoughts please scroll down to the comments box – feedback is very welcome.

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/