Faringdon, Berkshire*

 

A long view

They called it ‘Lord Berners’ monstrous erection’; they called it ‘the last folly’. But Lord Berners’ Folly will do, in memory of the versatile peer who was a modestly successful composer of modernist music and the occasional comic song, an able memoirist, and a rich eccentric of the old school who would entertain his friends by such exploits as dying his doves in brought colours and inviting Lady Betjeman and her horse to tea inside his house.

On his estate lies a hill, wooded at the top, which had been the site of fortifications – of King Alfred the Great, later of Queen Matilda – centuries ago. When the local council got permission to fell the trees for timber, Berners stepped in, bought the land, and saved the trees. He then employed the architect Gerald Wellesley to build this folly tower on the top of the hill. The story goes that the patron specified that the folly should be in the Gothic style but Wellesley, who disliked Gothic, made it Classical, until Berners discovered what he’d done and insisted on a Gothic lantern at the top. In truth the plain brick walls and arched windows are not very classical, and the octagonal lantern that capped the tower doesn’t look all that Gothic either – its pinnacles are plain, unlike the crocketed adornments of a latter-day Boston Stump. The folly is its own thing, a tall rather plain tower with a viewing room from which his lordship could admire the surrounding countryside; the vista stretches for many miles.

Apparently the locals weren’t too keen when they discovered that Lord Berners was building a tower on the hill above their town. But they got used to the idea and now people seem to embrace it, admiring the architecture and taking the chance to enjoy the view on the regular occasions when the folly is open. Eccentrics and good views: two things that the English traditionally like…and still, in most cases, have time for.

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*Or Oxfordshire, in modern parlance

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

 

A folly, but not entirely

Earl Bathurst, 18th-century lord of Cirencester and shape of its enormous park, clearly responded to the architectural fashions of the time. As well as classical buildings like the one in my previous post, Bathurst also included several Gothic ones in his park. This, probably the largest, is called Ivy Lodge. It looks over the park’s famous polo field so that its eccentric architecture can entertain spectators who feel they’ve endured one chukka too many. It’s easy to shrug buildings like this off as simply follies – bits of architectural nonsense that rich people liked to put up to indulged a whimsy. Of course, the design is whimsical – that very classical central upper window looks eccentric above Gothic openings and beneath faux-medieval battlements. But it’s also a building with a purpose. It’s actually a house that adjoins a series of farm buildings – barn, cart shed, granary, etc – some of which are attached to Ivy Lodge, some standing separately nearby. It’s all much plainer round the back.

Observant readers will have noticed that the windows on the left-hand part of the facade are blind. A side view (below) shows why. That part of the facade is just facade – its main purpose is to make the frontage symmetrical and to screen the farm buildings from view. That’s the kind of care that Earl Bathurst took when building the structures in his park. Many had a practical purpose, but all were meant to enhance the view. I’d be the last person to take issue with this care for visual things. The whole ensemble makes me happy – and that backdrop of trees makes me happier still. Looking at this picture makes me want to get my walking shoes on and go and look at it all again, very soon.

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I have posted previously on another building in Cirencester Park, Pope’s Seat, here. 

Thorpeness, Suffolk

Cloud-capped tower

There really is nowhere quite like Thorpeness, a 1920s seaside village, all weatherboarding, timber-framing (or is it mock-timber-framing?), and red tiles, just up the Suffolk coast from Aldeburgh. The atmosphere is a curious blend of seaside suburban, merrie England, and frontier shack, and wandering around it early on a misty morning made it impossible not to have a faint sense of the unreal. And also a sense of being somewhere utterly charming and unique. One building stands out above the others – literally above, since it towers to 70 feet and seems to consist of a small house perched on a tower. This singular structure, known as the House in the Clouds, is tall enough to be visible from the beach at Aldeburgh, where visitors must scratch their heads and wonder if their rum and raisin ice-cream is laced with rather more of the hard stuff then they expected.

A folly, then? Like most follies, it is there for a purpose, and originally for a very serious one. The village needed a water tower and architect F. Forbes Glennie came up with this picturesque design, setting the 50,000 gallon tank in the ‘house’ at the top. The rest of the tower was indeed a house, and its tenants must have had the best views for miles around. Now the views are better still, because the tank was dismantled and removed in 1979, when mains water came to Thorpeness, and the resulting space made into another room. As we walked up to the tower back in November, the mist cleared, revealing the structure, veiled slightly by trees but making us smile as countless passers-by before us must have done. Merrie England indeed.

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For more on The House in the Clouds and other such structures, see the wonderfully titled book Preposterous Erections (Frances Lincoln, 2012), by my friend Peter Ashley.

The House in the Clouds also has its own website, here.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

The foolish and the wise

The use of the word ‘folly’ in my previous post set some readers scratching their heads. What is a folly, exactly? That’s a good question, and one that has had many people stumped. A folly is a building without a practical purpose, some say. But what do we call a practical purpose? A house has a practical purpose, so does a mill, so does a garden shelter that protects people from a sudden shower of rain. But can an ornamental arch have a practical purpose – if it can also be a shelter, for example? And is a purely ornamental role enough for us to pigeonhole it as a folly? If the word ‘folly’ implies foolishness of some sort, we’re on difficult ground straight away: ‘where is the line drawn between foolishness and good sense?’ asks Stuart Barton.* Where indeed?

In what is perhaps the best book on follies, Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp look at it another way. ‘A folly is a misunderstood building,’ they say.† Why would anyone build a tower on a hill, or construct a concrete zoo in their garden, or spend a lifetime tunnelling under Liverpool? The people who did these things had their reasons, but we may very well not know what those reasons were. We have lost touch with the purpose of the building, which may have been practical, or may have seemed so to its creator. So we simplify matters by calling the results ‘follies’.

The writer and illustrator Barbara Jones, in another very good book on the subject, admits that defining a folly is tricky, and offers instead a list of qualities that such buildings often share.§ Follies are produced by people who have money, security and peace; they are most often Gothic (or Gothick) in style; they have much to do with their creator’s mood and emotions; they are fragile; they are very personal; they rely a lot on their setting; the relate to the Romantic movement in literature and painting; their great age was the 18th and 19th centuries. In bringing together these various qualities, Barbara Jones doesn’t get us any closer to a definition, but she at least evokes the mood of many of these structures – and that is a step towards understanding them, at least.

Some 18th-century gardens, like the one at Rousham in Oxfordshire, are full of what people have called follies. A number of these are actually very useful buildings that have a bit of extra adornment added on to them. In my photograph above, the building in the middle distance falls into this category.¶ It is known as the Temple of the Mill, and it is a mill with a fancy ornamental Gothic bit (quatrefoil window, pinnacles, flying buttresses) built on one end. Nowadays it seems to be used as a house. But it also serves as a picturesque feature in the landscape. It’s both useful and amusing.

In the far distance, on the hillside in front of the trees, is the Rousham Eye-catcher. It simply consists of a wall with three arches in it. It is designed to look like part of a ruined building of some kind, and acts as a focus for the viewer’s gaze when admiring the scenery from Rousham’s enchanting garden. It might also offer a little shelter from a stiff breeze, but its principal function is to enhance the view, to give people something to look at, just like Scheemakers’ striking, indeed somewhat disturbing, sculpture in the foreground, which shows a lion attacking a horse.

That’s purpose enough for me, and enough to make me doubt that the term ‘folly’ is really very helpful at all.**

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* Stuart Barton, Monumental Follies, Lyle Publications, 1972

† Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp, Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings, Aurum Press, 1986, reprinted1999

§ Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes, Constable & Co, 1953, reprinted with revisions 1973

¶ It may be clearer if you click on the photograph to enlarge it.

** Thanks however, to those who raised the question and sent me off to do some interesting reading and rereading.

Preston Capes, Northamptonshire

Englishman's home, Englishwoman's folly...

Just a couple of hours before finding the eccentric houses in the previous post, I came across this, another unusual building. It's known as The Folly, and it's two brick-built, crenellated dwellings with an archway between them. The picture shows them from the lane that gives access to them, but they must originally have been built to be seen from the other side, from across the fields. From that angle, there are more crenellations and the sloping roofs are largely hidden – but looking that way the day I was there, the building seemed to be largely screened by trees. So I was left admiring the building from the public road. It's still a rewarding view, with its engaging mixture of turrets and gables, its combination of tiny castle-like windows and larger, more domestic-looking ones, and its pleasing colour combination of red brick and green leaves.

According to the Preston Capes website, the building was originally commissioned in the 18th century by Lady Knightley of Fawsley Hall. It had the dual purpose of an eye-catcher and estate accommodation and in those days, apparently, the building contained four separate dwellings, each with a largish downstairs living room and a scullery downstairs and main bedroom and small room upstairs. The turrets contained staircases. So the building was hardly the grand castle that it might have looked like from a distance, just a cluster of very compact cottages, as down to earth as they are eye-catching.

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.

Broadway Tower, Worcestershire

Broadway Tower is on top of a hill on the borders of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire on a site that had long been used for lighting beacons. The hill is almost 1000 feet above sea level, so any fire lit there, or any light glimmering from a building, can be seen for miles. The story goes that the wife of George William, 6th Earl of Coventry, wanted a beacon she could see from her house in Worcester, and her husband decided on this site and chose James Wyatt as the architect.

Wyatt was known for his work in the Gothic style, but was a versatile designer – for this building of 1797–1800 turned his hand to a kind of Romanesque revival, with round-headed windows and castle-like turrets. The tower can certainly be seen for miles around, and people who like to make lists of such things argue about the dozen or more counties you are supposed to be able to see on a clear day from the top of the tower. There were of course even more before the local government reorganization of the 1970s.

People talk about buildings like Broadway Tower as ‘follies’. But, all these apparently eccentric towers, sham castles, grottoes, and so on were originally built for a purpose and when we know the purpose the buildings seem less bizarre. Broadway Tower was built to be seen, to be admired, and to admire the view from. Not so outrageous, really.