Horton, Dorset

Inspired by Vanbrugh?

Readers of my previous post may be interested to see a picture of the church at Horton that I mentioned there. It’s a very unusual building, with a curious L-shaped plan and a striking tower topped with a stone spire like an elongated truncated pyramid. This spire and the tower’s cornice are similar to details appearing on plans made by Sir John Vanbrugh, famous as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, for Eastbury Manor at Tarrant Gunville. It’s not known who designed the church. There is a chance it could have been Vanbrugh himself, but it is more likely that it was designed under his influence, perhaps by John Chapman, the mason who is recorded in the churchwarden’s accounts as having rebuilt the tower and other parts of the building in the 1720s.

Whoever it was produced a strong design, in which the tower’s exaggerated cornice, the chunky window surrounds, and other details catch the light memorably, and in which the spire gives the place a special character. When Vanbrugh wrote a memorandum on church-building for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in London in the 1712, he expressed his wish that the new churches should be ‘monuments to posterity…ornaments to the Town, and a credit to the Nation.’ The imposing quality of the tower and spire at Horton embodies this wish for monumental churches – but this time in a rural setting. The result is as characterful a country church as you could wish for. Vanbrugh would no doubt have approved.

Horton, Dorset

Vantage point

This tall brick tower, which dominates high ground near Chalbury Common in Dorset, is the kind of thing I normally leave to Peter Ashley, chronicler of Unmitigated England and connoisseur of bizarre and wonderful towers. But so memorable was my encounter with this building that I feel compelled to blog about it here. I could see the tower from the village, where I was visiting the strange, Vanbrugh-ish church, and made my way in its direction, soon realising that it must be some distance from the road. At first I could see no path to it, but then discovered that what I’d taken to be someone’s drive was actually the bridleway leading in the tower’s direction. So I was soon striding through bushes and trees following the sound of slowly moving hooves.

And then, once I was past the trees and the riders and into the bright spring sunshine, there it was: 140 feet of stunning mid-18th-century brickwork surrounded by sheep and lambs. Coming upon it like this, when my earlier view of it had been from some way off, confronted me instantly with its huge height and bulk, so the building was a surprise again, even though I’d seen it from afar, looking much smaller, only a few minutes before.

The tower was built by Humphrey Sturt, lord of the manor of Horton and MP for Dorset, and may have been intended as an observatory or to provide views of the local hunt making its way across the landscape. It’s so tall, and so bizarre with its combination of turrets and octagonal top, that it became known as Sturt’s folly. But let’s be grateful to Sturt for building this tower, which both enhances the view by its presence and gives us a pleasant, extra shock when we get up close to it and realise how big it really is. I for one am grateful that Mr Sturt wanted a good view, across the land or into the heavens.