In 1953 Barbara Jones published Follies & Grottoes, a ‘handsome book on a fascinating subject’. It was the first book to look at follies in any depth, and was well-received. Almost twenty years later it was announced that there would be a revised edition, for whilst the first edition was remembered as a pioneering book, it was ‘not a comprehensive survey’. Upon publication in November 1974 (fifty years ago this week) the new edition was judged ‘double the size and more than twice as good’.

Constable & Co. commissioned the first edition after Jones and Ralph Arnold, one of the directors of the publishing house, had become friends – Arnold had given Jones one of her first jobs in illustration in 1938. In February 1953 Bookseller magazine announced that ‘Barbara Jones has completed her long-expected work on Follies and Grottoes – a blend of melancholy, horror, genial extravagance and elegant conceits’.

In 1972 Jones was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to allow her to ‘revise and extend’ two of her books: The Unsophisticated Arts (1951) and Follies and Grottoes. The funding allowed her to travel across the nation to revisit follies and explore the many new ones which she had been made aware of since 1953. The book was originally to be published in 1973 and Constable & Co. plugged it as forthcoming in November 1972, but Jones had so much new material to work with that it would be November 1974 before the book was in the shops. It was priced at a then substantial £10: the reviewer for the Birmingham Daily Post wrote that the ‘mammoth’ book was ‘surely the last word on the subject’* with the caveat ‘as it should be at that price’.

One criticism of the 1st edition was the paucity of images, with Clough Williams-Ellis in The Spectator describing Jones’s ‘rather scratchy sketches’ as ‘starvation rations’. As well as including more follies, the 2nd edition also featured many more illustrations, although all are printed in black and white. These were mainly by Jones herself, but there are a handful by artist friends such as Mary Adshead (above), James Gardner, Bill Howell and Raymond Fieldhouse. Reviewing the new edition for the Times Literary Supplement, Julian Barnes summed up what Jones had achieved: ‘It is wholly thanks to Barbara Jones that the wider public knows about, let alone cares about, the towers, ruins, grottoes, tunnels, and other architectural oddities which adorn the countryside’.

Follies & Grottoes was featured in The Times in November 1974 as one of their recommendations of ‘Lovely presents for lovely people’, and the article was illustrated with one of Jones’s ‘dramatic ink drawings’: a view of the conical folly at Barwick Park (above). The Scotsman gave the book a mention, clearly delighted to find the Pineapple at Dunmore on the cover of the new edition.

Follies & Grottoes has long been out of print, so look out for a second-hand copy if it isn’t already on your bookshelves.

*Apparently not.

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the foot of the page to share any thoughts or comments.

As the festive season approached in 1970, families would have pored over the special edition of the Radio Times to see what treats the three television channels could offer. If on New Year’s Eve had they walked across the room to warm up the set, and twiddled the knob to find BBC One, they would have seen a programme called Follies of the Wise presented by Spike Milligan. The writer, actor and comedian toured Britain looking at follies: ‘strange monuments to our ancestors and their passions’. It must have reached a good audience, broadcast at 6.45pm and sandwiched between Nationwide and The Andy Williams Show.

The programme starts with Milligan on the roof of St Peter & St Paul in Ormskirk, Lancashire. Legend has it that two sisters were unable to decide whether the church should have a tower or a spire, so eventually they built both – it is complete nonsense as the tower and spire were built a century apart, but Milligan liked the tale and composed a limerick which he recited from the rooftop:

A lady in Lancs said a spire
Is what every church must require
But her sis with a glower
Said ‘A church needs a tower’
So they built one with both … and it’s dire.

Milligan then enjoys creating a glorious gallimaufry of characters, real and imagined, to tell the story of folly building, or ‘littering great lumps around the countryside for us to contemplate’, as he calls it. The programme budget must have been generous, as in England Milligan filmed follies as far apart as Somerset and Yorkshire. In Wales he acted out the history of Paxton’s Tower, and in Scotland he visited the monument on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, McCaig’s Tower in Oban and the Pineapple at Dunmore.

At Dunmore a Scotsman (Milligan in the style of Fyfe Robertson) interviews the Earl of Dunmore (Milligan) and asks the question in the minds of all who see the structure: ‘why a pineapple?’. After a pause the earl splutters… ‘well, why not?’.

In Somerset, Milligan became Jack the Treacle Eater, the mythical messenger who climbs down from atop his monument to fortify himself with treacle before running great distances to carry news. Milligan is seen scampering up and down the rocky base to the little turret having gorged on a mug of treacle.

At the Triangular Tower in Northamptonshire Milligan becomes the ghost of Sir Thomas Tresham, and at Dunstan Pillar in Lincolnshire and West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire he plays a troubled Sir Francis Dashwood on the psychiatrist’s couch. In Yorkshire he appears at the top of Wainhouse Tower as the eponymous builder of the huge chimney. And many more follies are visited with the creation of many more characters – the Flâneuse lost count when she reached 36 costume changes.

As one TV critic commented at the time (probably quoting a BBC press-release), ‘Spike’s explanation of why they were built may sometimes be more entertaining than plausible’. Actually, he doesn’t take too many liberties with the truth until he reaches Old John tower in Bradgate Park in Leicestershire.

Here his imagination runs riot, and in the character of a colourful local he tells a gullible American tourist (also Milligan) that the tower is used for ‘fish squirting’, ‘knee-crushing’ and ‘owl riveting’ and also as a ‘nun refinery’. The reviewer for the Leicester Daily Mercury thought the programme ‘delightful’ even though an ‘odd explanation’ was given of the history of the Leicestershire landmark. This is something of an understatement, and in fact a look at the original shooting script reveals that Milligan ad libbed this wacky description.

Bringing things right up-to-date Milligan featured Centre Point, the new 34 storey tower on London’s New Oxford Street. Milligan felt it was a folly as it had cost a fortune, but had stood vacant for some years after completion. The developer was insistent that it should be let to a single tenant, and he could afford for it to sit empty until he achieved this goal. Campaigners thought it would be better used to provide temporary accommodation for London’s homeless: Centrepoint, the charity which supports homeless young people, was named after this cause célèbre. 

Milligan ended the broadcast outside the building dressed as what the BBC called a ‘Hippie’ and singing The Tombs they are a-changing – an adaptation of Bob Dylan’s hit with lyrics about the follies he has visited.

Follies of the Wise was repeated in 1971 and 1972 before disappearing into the BBC archives. The Folly Flâneuse was lucky enough to see the very grainy (hence no stills featured here), and very zany, film.

Follies of the Wise was written by Sandy Brown and Martin Pawley after an original idea by R.G.Payne, and was directed by Jim Franklin. The Costume Designer, Barbara Lane, is to be commended for providing Milligan with outfits for his many characters.

The Folly Flâneuse has made a donation to Centrepoint in recognition of the help she received with this post https://centrepoint.org.uk

A fellow folly fan remembers racing off to visit Jack the Treacle Eater in Somerset after seeing it in Milligan’s broadcast. Does anyone else remember watching? Please scroll down to the comments box to share any thoughts. Thank you for reading.

Barbara Jones is best known to readers of these pages as the author of Follies & Grottoes (1953, revised 1974), the first book to consider the subject of garden and landscape buildings in any detail. She also wrote books about popular art, erotic postcards and furniture amongst other subjects, and as an illustrator and designer her work appeared in magazines, on calendars, dustjackets, greetings telegrams and much, much more.

One of the more unlikely places where her work could be found was in an elegant little magazine called Pan. Published on behalf of the pharmaceutical company Schering A G Berlin, Pan was sent to doctors and medical professionals and featured advertisments for the company’s ‘sex hormone preparations’ alongside medically themed cartoons by the likes of Michael Heath. Issues were compiled and produced by Napper Stinton Woolley, an advertising agency based in London’s Soho.

Magazine number 61 appeared in January 1969 and contained a very entertaining review of the spoof ‘Post-Op Art Explosion’ exhibition at the fictitious ‘Medic’s Gallery’ (very clever) by the Yorkshire GP Leonard Rosenthal. There was also a most peculiar short story about aphrodisiacs, and then, incongruously, an article by Barbara Jones about Follies with a wonderful title illustration:

The brief editorial introduction suggested that readers might like to take a ‘cosy afternoon run in the car’ to find a hermitage, or ruined tower, or counterfeit castle, and then Jones is given three pages to elaborate.

She began with a definition, describing a folly as a ‘largely pointless fantastic structure built by a fashionable land-owner in the eighteenth century’, and concluded that they were ‘a very clear manifestation of a certain quirky streak in the English character and they may look something like this:’

Jones picked out some of her favourites: the Sham Castle on the Bath skyline (top picture), the Pineapple at Dunmore in Scotland, Clytha Castle near Abergavenny and Jack the Treacle Eater in Somerset (all of which have featured in these pages – use the search button to find out more).

Moving on from the curious tales attached to Jack the Treacle Eater, Jones recounted the then recent story attached to the monument to William Pitt at Burton Pynsent, also in Somerset: in 1948 a cow is said to have climbed the spiral stair and, after rescue attempts failed, fell to its death from the top. (There has been some debate about the veracity of this tale: newspaper reports in 1947 and 1948 tell of heifers climbing the tower, but on both occasions with a rescued cow and a happy ending).

After describing the thrilling chill of grottoes Jones declared that ‘the Hermitage type of Folly is much more cheerful’. Her accompanying sketch illustrated how they were ‘picturesquely confected from rocks, branches, moss and bark, with a simple room or two, a rustic sacking bed, tables and chairs made from tree stumps…’

Jones ended her brief introduction to follies with some words of advice that remain pertinent for anyone embarking on a folly-finding expedition today – take a map, a torch and a flask of tea.

Your thoughts are always welcome – just scroll down to the comments box to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

A building that needs little, if any, introduction: the ne plus ultra of follies. But one that continues to perplex, as no architect has ever been identified for this the most ornate and glorious of garden buildings, erected in 1761 for Lord Dunmore. Very few early accounts can be found, but in 1768 a visitor wrote of emerging from woodland to find a pleasure house of which the ‘top part is built exactly in the form of a pineapple’.

The flanking walls supported glasshouses, and were heated to enable the growing of fruit – including pineapples, presumably. Adjacent to the ‘beautiful Pine-apple Summer house’ were four lodging rooms for the gardeners. A visitor in 1783 described the ‘Pine-apple Cupola’ as ‘highly gilded’, so it must have been a breathtaking and unique experience to see it in that period.

The Pineapple was presented to the National Trust for Scotland by the Countess of Perth in 1974. As the NTS’s year book for 1976 recorded, acceptance of the ‘bizarre structure in shape of pineapple’ was only made possible by the ‘co-operation of the Landmark Trust’. The Landmark Trust planned to make the elaborate centrepiece ‘habitable once again so that people may stay in this outstanding vegetable’.

The restored Pineapple quickly became a very popular Landmark Trust property. The grounds and walled garden remain in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, and are in need of a little love and attention when funds are available.

A brief post this week as the Folly Flâneuse is taking a week off to catch up after a Scottish sojourn (so expect more delights from that trip) and will then be heading off once again in pursuit of pavilions and on the trail of towers. Thank you for reading.

For stays in the Pineapple see https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/pineapple-10726/#Overview

To visit https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/the-pineapple