Until the middle of the 19th century visitors to Harewood House, near Leeds, could open the doors of the Saloon (today known as the Main Library) on the piano nobile and ‘walk out upon the fine portico’. From there they could admire the lake and plantations created by the finest landscape designers of the 18th century, and on the horizon they would glimpse a fine domed temple.

Harewood was built by John Carr for Edwin Lascelles (1713-1795) who was created Baron Harewood in 1790. In 1780, soon after the house was complete, Lascelles commissioned Carr to design a temple for the elevated ground south of the house. Carr (1723-1807) annotated his elevation drawing with the title ‘Temple of Venus’ and it shows an octagonal central drum surrounded by an arcaded basement and a colonnade around the first floor.

This first suggestion was quickly abandoned and Carr drew a new design with the central tower flanked by two wings ‘to allow a covered way to the upper room’. He was paid for all three drawings in December 1780. The section shows a grand interior, with a domed ceiling with decorative plasterwork. The name ‘Temple of Venus’ probably references the pigeon house which Carr remodelled to create the temple, doves being an attribute of Venus. There is no record of a statue of the goddess being placed in the temple, and in fact, the name disappears completely after the one inscription on Carr’s elevation, and it becomes known simply as ‘the temple’.

After the drawings were presented there was then an unexplained gap of 14 years when nothing seems to have happened. Then in 1794 there was a flurry of work to execute Carr’s designs: the pigeon house was cleaned, stone, timber and lead taken to the ‘temple’, and in 1796 the interior was plastered and a marble chimney piece was fitted. In the midst of all this work Edwin Lascelles, Lord Harewood, died and was succeeded by his cousin Edward Lascelles (1740-1820, created 1st Earl of Harewood in 1812). Once complete the temple became a popular destination for walks from the house.

The temple, whilst still an eye-catcher from the mansion, was later put to a more practical use as a dwelling house. At the time of the 1841 census it was home to John Lister, an ‘agricultural labourer’ and his 2 sons and 2 daughters. By 1851 Lister had died and the temple was home to his daughter Elizabeth, who had formerly been in service at Harewood House, and her siblings.

By 1855 Lord Harewood was considering demolishing the temple and had the materials valued. In 1857 wood and lead were stripped from the building, and in 1859 full demolition began: the earl’s agent wrote that it was ‘exceedingly well built and difficult to pull down’ and it eventually took 145 man-days to dismantle the temple and sort the materials. Much of the stone was reused at John Sawer’s nearby farm at Lofthouse.

The temple was then largely forgotten, although the ground around it remained known as Temple Wood. In autumn 2001 Harewood was the focus of an episode of the BBC’s House Detectives at Large. The BBC filmed archaeologists from the University of Bradford investigating the site of the temple, and uncovering the foundations of the octagonal central block and the two side wings. The clay pipes and pottery found on site were utilitarian, and probably dated from the period when the Lister family were in residence. So thorough had the clearance been in 1859 that a single block of dressed stone was the only remnant above ground.

One fragment of the temple might survive. In the private northern pleasure grounds a substantial stone urn stands as a feature. Its dimensions correspond with the urn on John Carr’s reworked plan, so perhaps this ornamental fragment was salvaged from the demolition in 1859 and given a new home.

John Carr was born in 1723 so this year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of his birth. Whilst the temple is gone, as is the portico on the south front (swept away by Sir Charles Barry when he remodelled the house in the 1840s), Harewood House, its stables and many estate buildings are still very much a monument to Carr’s skill and imagination as an architect.

The site of the Temple of Venus is not publicly accessible, but the view across the lake to the house that it enjoyed can be appreciated from the footpath which enters the park at Lofthouse Lodge, south of the house on the A61.

Also born 300 years ago in 1723 was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Harewood House is marking the occasion with a new look at his many works there, including the chance to see the portrait of Edwin Lascelles at close range and out of its grand frame. Reframing Reynolds can be seen until 28 August 2023, but if you can’t make it by then the portraits are always on display https://harewood.org

Thanks to Susan Kellerman who was the Folly Flâneuse’s partner-in-crime when first researching the temple many years ago, and to Rebecca Burton, Curator and Archivist at Harewood House.

Top image: View in the park at Harewood (detail). An intriguing view attributed to Harriet Lascelles with a design for a bridge (unexecuted) added in an unknown hand. Courtesy of the Harewood House Trust.

Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or further information – scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the comments box. Thank you for reading.

In September 1842 the 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane and his family welcomed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Taymouth Castle. They were greeted, with great ceremony, by pipers and by crowds of well-wishers in full highland costume, and a gun salute was fired. The Queen was charmed. During their brief stay Albert went hunting and shooting, returning with a bumper bag each evening, whilst the young monarch spent the days walking and riding in the park.

One day the royal party walked to the Dairy. Queen Victoria wasn’t sure quite how to describe the building, but settled for ‘a sort of Swiss Cottage, built of quartz’. As well as its practical purpose, the Dairy was also a belvedere, with the upper room and balcony giving a magnificent view of the River Tay flowing into Loch Tay, the pretty village of Kenmore, and up the loch to the hills and distant mountains.

Catherine Sinclair, visiting a couple of years earlier, had a more fanciful description: ‘nothing enchanted me more than the fancy dairy, built some years ago of transparent spar, like rough blocks of ice […] It looks as if an ice-berg had been stranded here and excavated for the occasion’.

The Queen’s own journal entry about the visit to the dairy is short, but by ‘her Majesty’s command’ Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote a detailed account of her visit to Scotland, published as Memorial of the Royal Progress in Scotland in 1843. He describes how the Queen walked in by the kitchen door, much to the surprise of the ‘damsels of the Dairy’ who were ‘astonished to see so fine a lady, though they could hardly have guessed that it was the fair Sovereign of these mighty kingdoms’. (This seems highly unlikely, as the workers on the estate had been preparing for the royal visit for weeks, but we must allow Sir Thomas his hyperbole.)

The dairymaids escorted the Queen around the Dairy, where she tried her hand at making butter before asking to try oaten cake. This caught her hosts unawares: they had nothing so rustic, but instead only a plate of ‘delicate’ cakes sent from the castle. The Queen did however enjoy a glass of ‘fine cold milk’ before continuing her walk. She was so impressed with the building that she revisited with Prince Albert on her final morning at Taymouth; the weather was clear and bright and she took her consort up onto the balcony to admire the view, where the Prince ‘entered fully into her Majesty’s admiration of it’.

Her visit was also celebrated in a poem by Samuel Fergusson. Be prepared – it’s very much of it’s time…

And then with steps of love descends
To learn some dairy lore;
And churning with her snow-white hands
Looks lovlier than before.

Tommore (or Tom-more), the hill on which the Dairy stands, was formerly home to a little 18th century pavilion, the Temple of Venus, which like its replacement had been so placed to take in the marvellous view of the lake and mountains.

The Temple of Venus was maintained until 1814, but demolished only a few years later to make way for the Dairy. Erected in 1830-31 to the design of William Atkinson (c.1774-1839), a pupil of James Wyatt, the ‘elegant and costly dairy’ rapidly became a highlight of a tour of the ‘celebrated pleasure grounds at Taymouth’. Its builder, John Campbell, created Marquis of Breadlabane in 1831, died in 1834, and it was his son the 2nd Marquis, who welcomed his sovereign to Taymouth Castle in 1842.

Sadly, as the photographs here show, the grade A listed Dairy is surrounded by scaffolding which has been in place now for a decade, and the structure lingers on the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland. Trees now surround the building, and the famed views can no longer be appreciated. Taymouth Castle became a hotel, and its grounds a golf course, in the 1920s, but after various uses the mansion has sat empty since the 1980s. It is currently being renovated as a hotel, and hopefully the Dairy too will be brought back to life in the not too distant future.

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