The Georgian Folly Craze: Why Landowners Built Ruins That Were Never Ruined

There is a particular kind of British building that has never been anything other than decorative. A Gothic tower with no rooms inside. A "ruined" abbey whose broken walls were pointed up by a mason in 1760, not weathered down by four centuries of rain. A Greek temple on a Yorkshire hillside, standing in a field where nobody ever sacrificed anything. These are follies, and the greatest flowering of them happened in the Georgian period, when the British landed gentry developed an appetite for architecture that served no purpose except to be looked at.

It was not simply eccentricity. Building a sham ruin was a statement about who you were, what you had read, and where you had travelled. Understanding that impulse is the key to enjoying these strange structures — and to reading a landscape that has been carefully staged for 250 years.

The Grand Tour and the politics of taste

From the late seventeenth century onwards, wealthy young men finished their education with a tour of France and Italy. They came home with crates of antiquities, portraits by minor Italian masters, and above all a vocabulary of classical architecture. Some came home with genuine ambitions to build in the Roman manner; most came home with a determination to be seen to build in it.

At first this produced the dignified Palladian house — symmetry, porticos, correct proportions. By the middle of the eighteenth century, correctness had begun to feel a little dull. The next generation wanted variety, surprise and the thrill of the picturesque. They had read about Roman villas, Greek temples and medieval abbeys, and they wanted the scenery of those places without the inconvenience of leaving England.

The result was a landscape dotted with architectural quotations. Lord Burlington and William Kent had set the tone at Chiswick in the 1720s, but the fashion spread far beyond the aristocratic elite to anyone with a few acres, a taste for improvement and money to spend on a gardener, an architect and a bricklayer.

Capability Brown's problem, and the folly's solution

The great landscape improvers of the eighteenth century smoothed estates into sweeping parkland: rolling grass, belts of trees, a serpentine lake. It was beautiful. It was also, at times, a little monotonous. A wide green prospect needs punctuation, and follies provided it.

Place a temple at the end of a vista and the eye has somewhere to rest. Put a Gothic tower on the highest point and the whole park gains a silhouette. Sink a sham bridge into the trees and the walker suddenly has a destination. Follies were the punctuation marks in a long, flowing sentence of landscape, and they were usually positioned by eye rather than by plan.

Three ways follies worked on the visitor

• Framing. A temple or arch placed to close a view turned a walk into a sequence of composed pictures.
• Surprise. The unexpected grotto, hermitage or quarry garden provided the jolt of delight that Georgian theorists called the sublime and the merely pleasing.
• Story. A "ruined" castle let a landowner imply his family had owned the ground since the Middle Ages, however recent the actual purchase.

Sham ruins: instant antiquity, built to order

The sham ruin is the most deliciously dishonest of all follies. Genuine medieval buildings were being demolished all over Britain to make way for new houses and to supply cheap stone. Rather than mourn, some landowners decided to manufacture their own ruins from scratch — or to leave a genuine fragment deliberately unfinished and prop it up in a tumbled configuration.

The techniques were practical. Masons built walls with jagged, broken tops, sometimes thickening them at the base so the ruin would look top-heavy and precarious. Cracks were cut rather than waited for. Ivy was planted early, sometimes with the roots fed deliberately. In a few cases the stonework was simply left in a convincing state of collapse and the vegetation allowed to do the rest. Within ten years, the effect was indistinguishable from the real thing to all but a trained eye.

The message was complicated and slightly absurd: my family's history is so secure that I can manufacture its relics. It worked. Visitors, guidebooks and later photographers all read the sham ruins roughly as intended.

Temples, towers, obelisks and the odd hermit

Beyond ruins, the Georgian estate could contain almost anything. Small classical temples — round, rectangular or octagonal — were the most common, often built of brick and rendered, then painted or stuccoed to look like stone. Towers came in Gothic, castellated and occasional Moorish flavours. Obelisks marked viewpoints or commemorated victories abroad. Grottoes lined with shells, spar and glass answered a fashion for the subterranean.

Hermitages deserve their own note. Some were simply rustic cottages built of roots and moss, with no hermit in residence at all. A few landowners hired a man to live in one and be picturesque, which generally proved a short-lived arrangement: real hermits, understandably, wanted company, wages and food, and the novelty of sitting in a damp hut wearing a beard occasionally wore thin on both sides.

What the folly craze tells us about Georgian Britain

Follies are often dismissed as the playthings of the idle rich. That is part of the story, but not all of it. They were also a form of public communication in a society obsessed with rank, with the ownership of land, and with the appearance of learning. A landowner who built well — or employed a good architect to build for him — was announcing that he had read the right books and travelled to the right places.

There is a practical lesson for anyone who walks these landscapes now. Follies were designed to be seen from particular points, and the trees around them have grown for two centuries. If a temple looks oddly placed, find the old maps and the surviving avenues: the view it was built for has usually been swallowed by planting. Standing where the designer intended, even roughly, changes everything.

Where to see the craze at its best

You do not need a stately home to enjoy Georgian follies. Many stand on public land, in country parks and on National Trust and English Heritage sites, and a surprising number are visible from public footpaths.

1. Check the estate map, not just the guidebook. Follies are often well away from the house, at the far end of an avenue or on a hilltop boundary.
2. Visit in winter for structure, summer for atmosphere. Leafless trees reveal the intended sightlines; full foliage shows how the ruin sits in its setting.
3. Look at the base of the walls. Coursed, neat stonework under a ragged top is a strong hint that the ruin was built as one.
4. Read the date stone. A very precise date on a very ancient-looking building is a confession.
5. Take binoculars on a long walk. Follies are frequently visible from a public right of way on neighbouring land, even when the estate itself is closed.

Getting more out of a folly hunt

Treat a day of folly-spotting as a slow business. Pick two or three sites rather than six, and give yourself time to sit and look. Georgian designers built for contemplation, and the buildings repay it.

Read the contemporary descriptions where you can find them — county histories, estate sale catalogues, early nineteenth-century guidebooks. They tell you what a building was meant to be, which is often far stranger than what it now appears to be. And keep a note of what you find, because follies are fragile: unroofed, unmortared, often unloved, and quietly disappearing into the ivy. The best way to protect them is to notice them.

Photo: Mick Latter / Pexels