architecture, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Lincolnshire, Obelisk, Summerhouse

Arches & Obelisk, Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire

Moments from the Great North Road, as it passes through Lincolnshire, is Stoke Rochford Hall in its lovely undulating park. The present house is a delicious early Victorian confection of towers and turrets, contemporary with the obelisk. But there were earlier houses in the park, and two intriguing arches are reminders of an earlier age.

architecture, Borders, Column, eyecatcher, Folly, garden history, landscape, Monument, Obelisk

The Monument, Penielheugh, Borders, Scotland

On Sunday 18 June 1815 the British and Prussian armies, commanded respectively by the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal von Blücher, won the Battle of Waterloo. There were immediate demands for monuments across Britain to celebrate this great victory, but none were so quick to respond as William Kerr, the 6th Marquis of Lothian, and his family. By the end of June funds had been raised to erect ‘a monument on the summit of Penielheugh’, a lofty hill on the Marquis’s Monteviot estate.