Article by The Folly Fellowship
The Folly Fellowship is a charity that was formed in 1988 to preserve, protect and promote follies, grottoes and garden buildings. The Garden Museum’s current exhibition Lost Gardens of London features a number of such structures, and the Fellowship is delighted to offer its support.
Members are often asked to define a folly, but there is no one answer. Their quirky nature means they are often impossible to categorise – which is all part of the fun. Usually the key to a folly is excess – it will be too big, or too expensive, or too ostentatious or just too odd… Sometimes they will have a lurid or fanciful story attached – and sometimes it is even true! A folly often keeps its secrets well, leaving today’s visitors to ponder its origins. Often follies will be described as having no purpose, but even the most eccentric and apparently useless hilltop feature will serve as an eye-catcher to make the passer-by wonder at its history.
Garden buildings are easier to define and include the wonderful assemblages of towers, temples and summerhouses ornamenting landscape parks such as Stowe, Stourhead, Studley Royal and Painshill Park, as well as individual temples and towers in smaller gardens.
Near Yeovil in Somerset a group of curious structures can be found. Oddest of all is a rough arch which carries a little turret on which stands a statue of Mercury (or Hermes). This is known as Jack the Treacle Eater, and the tale is told that the figure on top is Jack, a messenger boy who fortified himself with treacle so he could run great distances to deliver notes and news. We know the where and when: it was built in the 18th century by the Messenger family of Barwick Park but the why remains a mystery.
Always an entry in any top ten of follies is The Pineapple at Dunmore in Stirlingshire. In around 1761 the Earl of Dunmore decided to top a classical summerhouse with an enormous stone pineapple. The detail and the workmanship are outstanding, but no record of its architect or construction seems to survive. The pineapple symbolises a warm welcome, and the structure was no doubt used for picnics and banquets, but the fruit was also an expensive commodity in those days – as must have been this status symbol of a building. The Pineapple continues to offer hospitality as one of the properties of the Landmark Trust.
Some follies take the form of a sham – a building pretending to be something it isn’t. In Suffolk stands the Tattingstone Wonder which appears to be a village church, but is in fact a row of cottages with a fake church facade erected as an eyecatcher in 1790.
Grottoes come in all sorts of guises. Sometimes they can be a dark and dank rocky cave, designed to send a shiver down the spine of visitors, or they can be a sparkling shelter studded with shells and minerals.
The piece in the Lost Gardens of London exhibition that the Folly Fellowship chose to support is a small watercolour of the Tortoise’s Grotto that once stood in the Surrey Zoological Gardens. Although this is now lost, the age of building follies for tortoises is not over. Folly Fellowship member Alan Terrill liked the look of a folly in the park at Leigh Park, Havant, and decided to build a miniature version for his tortoises. Such is his attention to detail that he even recruited the conservation architect who had worked on the restoration of the full size version to advise on the structure.
Folly Fellowship members receive regular magazines full of folly features as well as occasional publications and papers. The society’s website hosts back issues and there are hours of fun to be had flicking through years of folly research and gossip. There is also a programme of talks and events and an annual garden party in a folly setting. New members are always welcome and you can find out more at www.follies.org.uk.