The fashion for follies spanned the Georgian and Victorian eras, with exotic looking buildings put up by landowners to show off their sophistication and wealth. Here's a guide to 10 in Herts you can wonder at
Bridgewater Monument
A folly is a ‘costly structure that is (considered) useless’ says The Concise Oxford Dictionary, so does the Bridgewater Monument pass muster? It’s on the Ashridge Estate near Berkhamsted and we are encouraged to climb 172 steps for fantastic views over the 5,000 acres of surrounding woodland, downland and meadow.
Built to commemorate Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (1736-1803), the Greek column went up in 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act. The chap was worth lauding: known as the Canal Duke, he was responsible for the eponymous Bridgewater Canal built to transport coal from his mines in Worsley to Manchester. So, a worthy, and a viewing platform from where you can glimpse Canary Wharf; perhaps not such a folly after all.
Folly Arch
At Brookmans Park you'l find the appropriately named Folly Arch, which has been a local eye-catcher since the first half of the 18th century. The man flashing the cash was Jeremy Sambrooke as part of his ambitious garden overhaul at the Gobions Estate, laid out by Charles Bridgeman. The gardens were well underway when Queen Caroline, George II’s consort, visited them in the same year the Bridgewater Monument went up.
This structure really does seem to have folly credentials, with faux crenelations, but also because it’s required plenty of money over the years to prevent it falling down.
Eleanor Cross
Edward I may have been ‘Malleus Scotorum’ (the Hammer of the Scots) but he was also a bit of a softie. When his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, died in 1290 after 36 years of marriage, he ordered a series of 12 lavishly decorated crosses to be erected, each one marking a resting place as her funeral cortege headed from the Midlands to Westminster Abbey.
There were two crosses in Hertfordshire, one at St Albans, now sadly no longer, and the existing, albeit restored, one at Waltham Cross. They serve no practical purpose, other than perhaps being meeting places and waymarkers over the centuries, but it doesn’t feel like an act of folly erecting memorials to a lost wife, rather a beautiful act, still powerful more than 700 years later.
New Church
The folly at Ayot St Lawrence does have a purpose - it’s a parish church but it’s far showier than it needs to be, hence its inclusion. It’s a grand gesture sitting in countryside - a Grecian Revival Neoclassical church that’s known as the New Church having replaced the village's Old Church between 1778-79.
The earlier church had obstructed the view of merchant Sir Lionel Lyde, 1st Baronet of Ayot House, so it had already been partially demolished and left as a romantic ruin. The New Church architect was Nicholas Revett who’d visited Greece so was imbued with visions of classical antiquity: He designed the front portico and columns to be an eye-catcher from Sir Lionel's house.
Stratton’s Folly
In Little Berkhamsted, Stratton’s Folly is a five-storey observation tower that rises 97 feet above the village. It was erected in 1789, the year the French Revolution began, for John Stratton who, according to the possibly apocryphal tale, was a retired admiral who fancied being able to follow the ships on the distant Thames. If true, he sounds a bit like Captain Cat from Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood.
Described as a ‘Prospect Tower’, the standout building lay derelict for over a century but has now been converted to a dwelling. So now a folly with purpose.
St Paul’s Walden Bury temples
Sitting within a renowned 18th century landscape garden lies St Paul’s Walden Bury, a grand house of c.1720, home to the Bowes Lyon family and the childhood home of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. There is more than one folly here. The summer house at one end of the lake looks every inch a Greco-Roman temple, while there’s also another, circular garden temple, by James Wyatt of 1775 that was brought here from an Essex country house in the 1950s. Where you’ve got lots of land (about 50 acres in this case) you may as well double up on the follies.
The family open up the gardens for the National Garden Scheme in the summer each year.
Tring Park summerhouse
In contrast to St Paul’s Walden Bury, the park at Tring is a public open space which extends to well over 250 acres. It once belonged to Tring Park Mansion, built in 1682 by the same Sir Christopher Wren who conceived the new St Paul’s Cathedral, with grounds laid out by that man Charles Bridgeman who was also busy at Gobions.
Accoutrements in the form of a summerhouse and other miscellaneous structures were added by James Gibbs. The summerhouse, in the park’s north east corner, comes replete with stately four-column temple-style portico, and is Grade II listed.
Tring Park obelisk
In Tring Park’s north east corner there’s also a 50-foot tall obelisk, also Grade II listed, and dubbed ‘Nell Gwynne’s Monument’. Charles II’s amour is said to have lodged at Dunsley House on the edge of the park. Having first come to the Merry Monarch’s attention in around 1668, Nell soon became a favoured mistress, bestowing two sons on the king.
Local tales persist that the obelisk was erected in her honour but it’s more likely it was just the usual extravagant folly, courtesy of Tring Park mansion’s then owner, Sir William Gore (1644-1707), Lord Mayor of London.
Scott’s Grotto
Built for John Scott, the 18th century poet, landscape gardener, social conscience and owner of Amwell House, Scott’s Grotto is the largest of its kind in the UK with a succession of chambers extending more than 65 feet into chalk hillside.
Decorations abound; shells, flints, fossils, minerals and coloured glass. The grotto was very much on the tourist trail into Victorian times, before falling into disuse. It was restored in the early 1990s and is today Grade I listed. Scott described his creation in typically poetic form: ‘Glossy pebbles pave the varied floors, and rough flint walls are deck’d with shells and ores’.
Charter Tower
In Gadebridge Park in Hemel Hempstead is the Charter Tower, a two-storey ashlar structure that seems marooned. As the entranceway and all that remains of Richard Combe’s manor house, built between 1540-95, it’s something that wasn’t intended as a folly but has become one.
Combe was doubly-knighted, firstly by Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth in 1656, an honour that lapsed with the Restoration, but was bestowed anew by Charles II in 1661. The name of the tower refers to a story (a tall one) that Henry VIII stayed here with Anne Boleyn when he granted Hemel its market charter.
