The Temple of the Four Winds

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  Howsham is the best vantage point for the south approach to Castle Howard, the spectacular palace built for the rather nondescript but obviously uncontrollably wealthy third Earl of Carlisle, Charles Howard, by the soldier and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh gave the Earl the sumptuous baroque palace he so desperately wanted, but indulged his own preferences for battlements in the walls and outbuildings. The extraordinary thing about this commission is that when Vanbrugh was approached by Howard he was a military man just embarking on a remarkably successful second career as a popular playwright, and as far as is known he had never before shown the slightest inclination towards architecture. Yet he was incontrovertibly appointed the architect for Castle Howard, and even if he was aided by Nicholas Hawksmoor it seems that the design was his.
  
  Before reaching Vanbrugh's fortified walls, the visitor encounters at the extreme edge of the Howard estate, on Bulmer Hill near Welburn, the column to the memory of George William Frederick Howard, the seventh Earl. The column was designed by F.P.Cockerell. The Carrmire Gate of circa 1725, a rusticated arch with broken pediment and six tiny pyramids on piers, running off into castellated walls, is actually by Hawksmoor. After some two thousand feet of wall a tall gate of 1719, with side pavilions and a pyramid roof, provides the main entrance to the estate. The gate was designed by Vanbrugh, but it is the castellated wall with a total of eleven different gothick bastions that shows his hand at its best. Some of the bastions are square, others round or hexagonal, all harking back to Vanbrugh's Blackheath Castle and the Claremont Belvedere which he had built since first starting on Castle Howard in 1699. Further north, on the crossing of the two drives, stands a 100 foot obelisk, making it his first folly here as it dates from 1714. There is a Latin inscription to the Duke of Marlborough, but on the other side is a later inscription:
  • IF TO PERFECTION THESE PLANTATIONS RISE
    IF THEY AGREEABLY MY HEIRS SURPRISE
    THIS FAITHFUL PILLAR WILL THEIR AGE DECLARE
    AS LONG AS TIME THESE CHARACTERS WILL SPARE
    HERE THEN WITH KIND REMEMBRANCE READ HIS NAME
    WHO FOR POSTERITY PERFORM'D THE SAME.
    
    CHARLES THE III EARL OF CARLISLE
    OF THE FAMILY OF THE HOWARDS
    ERECTED A CASTLE WHERE THE OLD CASTLE OF
    HENDERSKELFE STOOD, AND CALL'D IT CASTLE-HOWARD.
    HE LIKEWISE MADE THE PLANTATIONS IN THIS PARK
    AND ALL THE OUT-WORKS, MONUMENTS AND OTHER
    PLANTATIONS BELONGING TO THE SAID SEAT.
    HE BEGAN THESE WORKS
    IN THE YEAR MDCCII
    ANNO D:MDCCXXXI

  
  An apt illustration of the principle that he who provides the money gets the credit, though the awareness of his responsibility to posterity and the passage of time reads pleasantly nowadays.
  
  
  East of the great house is the Temple of the Four Winds by Vanbrugh, a shoot from Palladio's Villa Rotonda. From here one takes in the carefully composed Claude-like picture of Sion Wood to the left, the New River bridge in the middle distance and, as a focal point, Hawksmoor's gigantic mausoleum. This is shaped like a domed Greek tholos, round, with pillars carrying a frieze. The third Earl of Carlisle is buried here. Around it Daniel Garrett later added the fortified wall, square with semicircular projections on each side. From the mausoleum one can see the tall Hawksmoor pyramid of 1728 to the southwest. Further to the southeast is Pretty Wood, hiding another pyramid and a column called the Four Face (quatre faces - Carfax); the same name serves the large vase with four heads on each side at Bramham Park.

  From the original draft of Follies by Gwyn Headley & Wim Meulenkamp, published by Jonathan Cape in 1986 and 1990, now out of print.

  The new, expanded, fully revised and rewritten FOLLIES, GROTTOES AND GARDEN BUILDINGS by Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp, with photos on nearly every one of its 600 pages, is available from GREAT bookshops at £20 (ISBN 1-85410-625-2, published by Aurum Press, July 15 1999). Signed copies are available direct from the authors. Send a UK cheque for £23 (inc. p&p, UK only) made payable to "Gwyn Headley" to:

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