Edge Hill, Warwickshire

Cutting edge

Coming across this on an autumn morning on a quiet road in Warwickshire is enough to bring the curious traveller to a halt, and reduce one to slack-jawed and questioning amazement. What is it, exactly, and why is it here?

The short answer, it’s a pub, is only part of the story. This stone tower hasn’t been a pub all its life. It’s not a castle either. The windows are much too big for a medieval castle that had to defend itself against slings and arrows. The battlements are too slight to conceal all but the most elfin defender. The whole thing looks more like the fanciful Gothic (or ‘Gothick’) of the 18th century, intended to make its mark in the landscape. And so it proves.

The tower at Edge Hill was built by Sanderson Miller, a local gentleman and amateur architect who was improving his estate in the middle of the 18th century. As well as transforming his Tudor house at Radway in the Gothic style, and doing up his gardens, he built the octagonal tower as a combination of eyecatcher and viewpoint, right on the edge of the escarpment. According to legend, the place was also the precise spot where King Charles raised his standard before the battle of Edge Hill, the inconclusive clash of 1642 at the beginning of the English Civil War.

In 1747, Miller put up the octagonal tower, and he soon added the adjoining buildings, including the square tower and bridge, recently renewed, designed to span the road. The octagonal part is modelled on a tower at Warwick Castle, and commands panoramic views across the plain below. As if the links with the vast castle at Warwick, and with Charles I, weren’t allusions enough to English history, the interior included a ceiling decorated with the coats of arms of the Saxon kingdoms.

So the Edge Hill tower was a building with ‘heritage’ plastered all over it and tradition set in its stones. But in the 1740s this was all rather revolutionary. Gothic was still an unusual style for country houses, but at the same tima as Miller was working at Edge Hill and Radway, Horace Walpole, the man credited with kick-starting the 18th-century Gothic revival, was rebuilding his Twickenham House, Strawberry Hill, in a similar, yet more fanciful, Gothic style. Miller’s work, like the more famous Walpole’s, caught the imagination of country house owners. A number were soon asking Miller to redesign their homes, and a modest scattering of castle towers, fan vaults, tracery, and sham ruins began to spread across Warwickshire and beyond. Miller’s tower, at first glance a rich landowner’s folly, was also an architect’s calling card.