Why Georgian Landowners Built Follies: A Short History

Walk the park of a great Georgian estate and you are walking through somebody's argument. The house faces the lawn; the lawn opens onto a lake; and on the ridge beyond sits a temple, a tower, or a carefully broken wall that looks as though it has been there for six centuries. None of it is accidental. Between roughly 1714 and 1830, landowners across Britain spent serious money on buildings with no practical purpose at all — and they knew exactly what they were doing.

The Landscape Was the Message

The Georgian period saw the formal garden give way to the landscape park. Straight avenues and clipped box were replaced by grass, water and trees arranged to look natural, which took a great deal of engineering. In that setting, buildings did the work that hedges and parterres had once done: they gave the eye something to land on.

A temple at the end of a ride, a column on a hilltop, a Gothic arch glimpsed across water — these are what designers called eye-catchers. They punctuate a view and pull a visitor forward through the landscape, one scene after another. Sometimes the effect was frankly theatrical. At Bathwick Hill near Bath, Ralph Allen had a sham castle built in the early 1760s, from designs by Sanderson Miller, so that he could look out from his town house and see a romantic ruin on the horizon instead of a bare hillside. Miller made a speciality of this kind of thing, supplying drawings for a ruined castle at Hagley and a sham Gothic ruin at Wimpole.

The logic is easy to grasp once you are standing in it: if you cannot wait three hundred years for a genuine ruin, you build one.

Italy, Greece and the Grand Tour

Many Georgian landowners had spent months or years travelling in Europe as young men, and they came home with a taste for classical architecture and a trunk full of ideas. A temple of Apollo, a Pantheon, an obelisk or a Doric portico in a Wiltshire valley was a souvenir on a grand scale — a way of quoting Italy without leaving home. Stourhead in Wiltshire is the classic example, a garden built around a circuit of classical buildings that a visitor walks through in sequence, as though moving through a painted landscape.

The Gothic arrived alongside it. Horace Walpole began turning his villa at Strawberry Hill into "a little Gothic castle" from the late 1740s, and the fashion spread to towers, gatehouses and sham abbeys. The taste was not really archaeological. It was romantic: medieval buildings carried associations of ancestry, melancholy and long history, and a landowner could borrow those associations by building in the same idiom. William Beckford's enormous Fonthill Abbey, begun in the 1790s, took the fashion to its most extravagant conclusion — its great tower came down twice, which tells you something about the enthusiasm involved.

Politics in Stone

Some follies were openly political. At Stowe in Buckinghamshire, Lord Cobham laid out a garden that doubled as a manifesto. The Temple of British Worthies, with its busts of figures such as Shakespeare, Milton, Newton and Locke, and the Temple of Liberty nearby, made a quietly pointed case about liberty, merit and the failings of the government of the day. Cobham's young political allies — Pitt the Elder among them — were known as Cobham's Cubs, and the garden was part of the same campaign.

The same instinct shows at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire. Hoober Stand, completed in the late 1740s, celebrated the defeat of the Jacobite rising, and Keppel's Column, finished in 1780, honoured Admiral Augustus Keppel after his acquittal at a politically charged court martial. Both were raised by the Rockingham Whigs, and both were visible for miles. A tower on a ridge is a statement you cannot avoid reading.

Status, Hospitality and the Marriage Market

An estate was a stage, and Georgian landowners were permanently on it. Visitors expected to be shown the house, the park and the points of interest, and a folly gave the housekeeper something to talk about. It also gave the owner a signature. Anyone with money could build a plain park wall; a pineapple, a grotto lined with shells or a castle named after your own family is harder to confuse with the neighbours'.

Not every folly was boastful. Clytha Castle in Monmouthshire was raised at the end of the 1790s by William Jones as a memorial to his wife — a building with no purpose except remembrance, which is arguably the most honest folly of them all.

Money, Work and Improvement

Follies needed spare cash, and Georgian landowners had more of it than most. Enclosure, improved farming and rising rents produced fortunes, and there was pressure to spend some of it visibly. Building also kept masons, carpenters and labourers employed, which mattered in a parish where the landowner was the local employer and the local magistrate. The claim that many follies were built to keep men in work through a hard winter is repeated often and is hard to prove in individual cases — but the underlying instinct, that a rich man with a poor parish should find work for it, was entirely conventional.

There was a practical side too. A well-planted park with attractive buildings raised the value of an estate, and a folly could double as a banqueting room, a hunting tower, a summerhouse or a lodge. Quite a few "follies" have always had a use.

What Actually Counts as a Folly

The word is used loosely, and the Georgian owners of these buildings rarely used it themselves. It usually describes a building with no serious function, or one that pretends to be something it is not. The commonest sorts include:

• Sham ruins and mock castles — a broken wall, a Gothic window and a tower, arranged to suggest centuries of decay.
• Towers, columns and obelisks — the quickest way to put a vertical mark on a skyline, often with a commemorative plaque.
• Classical temples — Doric, Ionic or Corinthian, placed to close a view or shelter a picnic.
• Grottoes and shell houses — damp, expensive and hugely fashionable in the middle of the eighteenth century.
• Eye-catchers, belvederes and gazebos — built to be looked at, or to be looked from.
• Ornamental oddities — a giant stone pineapple, a pyramid with a window in it, a tower with a room shaped like a shell.

If you are trying to decide whether a building is a folly, ask what it was for. A windmill without machinery, a castle with no courtyard and a gateway leading nowhere are all telling you the same thing: the point was the look of it.

Seeing Them For Yourself

Begin with the landscape rather than the building. Stand at the house, find the line of the avenue or the lake, and look for what the view was aimed at; the folly is usually sitting at the end of it. In a park, the best vantage points are often the public footpaths that cross the estate, so a map is more useful than a guidebook — old names on Ordnance Survey maps such as "Temple", "Tower", "Folly" and "Castle", with no medieval history attached, are good leads.

Listing records are free to search online and often explain who built a structure and when. The National Trust, English Heritage, Historic Houses and the county garden trusts look after many of the best examples, while the Folly Fellowship exists specifically for people who like these buildings.

Most follies, though, stand on private land or farmland. View them from rights of way, keep to the path, leave gates as you find them, and ask at the estate office if you want a closer look. Do not climb: Georgian brickwork and eighteenth-century stone staircases are frequently in worse condition than they appear, and a folly you can visit next year is worth more than a photograph taken from the top of one today.

Photo: Anna Lupa / Pexels