Alfred's Tower, Stourhead, Wiltshire

• The garden at Stourhead is the jewel in the National Trust's crown. Of all the great eighteenth century gardens - Hawkstone, Hackfall, Studley Royal, Stowe, Painshill, the Leasowes among many - Stourhead has maintained a continuity over two hundred years, maturing slowly under the English summer sun, lying dormant in the changeable English winter. It is the premier grand cru of English gardens, owned by the same family, the bankers Hoare, from 1715 to 1947. Henry Hoare II began the garden as we see it today in 1740, by damming the head of the river Stour to create a romantic serpentine lake. He employed Henry Flitcroft, a protege of Lord Burlington's, who had designed Benjamin Hoare's Boreham House, Essex in 1727, to provide some garden buildings. Flitcroft's first essays in folly architecture were classical, and the formality of his temples contrasted sharply with the new informality in garden design pioneered by Kent and Bridgman and enthusiastically maintained by gifted amateurs like Hamilton, Shenstone and Hoare before reverting to professionals with Brown and Repton.
  
• The National Trust's guidebook goes into much greater detail than we have room for here, so a short catalogue of the interesting buildings will suffice. The first, chronologically, was the Grotto of 1740, perhaps by Hoare himself, looking across the lake to St. Peter's Church and the Tuscan Temple of Flora (originally the Temple of Ceres) by Flitcroft in 1744. Then came the OX of 1748, possibly by Francis Cartwright, to the memory of Hoare's father, then Flitcroft's Pantheon, or Temple of Hercules, from 1754. This is a domed temple with a Corinthian portico, unnaturally white in the naturally green and brown landscape. Flitcroft's last garden building was the Temple of Apollo, or the Temple of the Sun, based on the Temple at Baalbec, finished in 1767; but as this was taking shape he designed a real no-nonsense folly up west on a hill straddling the Somerset border.
  
  Alfred's Tower is one of the finest triangular folly towers in the country, designed by the man who gave us Wentworth Woodhouse's Hoober Stand and Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park, the first triangular folly tower. Alfred's Tower stands 160 feet high, sheer windowless brick, unashamedly built for the view from the top - the ten tiny stair-turret windows do no more than illuminate the steps. Designed in 1765, it was completed in 1772 on the spot where
  

  • Alfred the Great AD 870
    On this summit erected his
    standard against Danish
    invaders. To him we owe the
    origin of Juries, the establishment
    of a Militia, the creation of a
    Naval Force.
    Alfred, the light of a
    benighted age was a
    philosopher and a Christian,
    the father of his people,
    the founder of the English.
    MONARCHY and LIBERTY
    
    

  The plaque is placed above the door and below a large niche holding a statue of King Alfred. Lighter coloured brickwork in one of the angle turrets show where a de Havilland Mosquito flew into the tower during the war.* Henry Hoare had the idea of the tower in 1762 after reading about Alfred in Voltaire's "Histoire Generale", and initially wanted to build a replica of St. Mark's Tower in Venice.
  
  A little way away is St. Peter's Pump, a fifteenth century conduit removed from Bristol in 1768 and reerected on a grotto base over the spring in Six Wells Bottom, a grassy marshy valley descending towards the house. There is another removal right at the head of the lake - the 1373 Bristol High Cross, given to Henry Hoare in 1780. It punctuates the view of the lake an the Pantheon to perfection.
  
  
  If we treat a garden as important as Stourhead in an apparently desultory fashion, it is because there is already such a wealth of accurate and accessible information about the place that little or no amplification is needed in a work of this nature. Fonthill is different; it is private and there is no guide book, although the interested student will find a very wide range of literature on the subject. Stourhead is romantic fact - it exists; Fonthill is romantic fiction - it doesn't.
  
  From the original draft of Follies by Gwyn Headley & Wim Meulenkamp, published by Jonathan Cape in 1986 and 1990, now out of print.
  
  *Since this text was written in the early 1980s new information has come to light about the 'plane crash. Apparently it was a de Havilland Norseman which hit the top of the tower in dense fog on July 10th 1944, killing all five American servicemen on board. The lighter coloured brickwork is a repair carried out in the early 1960s, after a large part of the wall fell away while there were visitors at the top of the tower. The visitors had to make their way down the spiral staircase past a gigantic gaping hole in the fabric of the building. Not the sort of thing one would easily forget...

• Chris Nelms runs a non-profit website devoted to the Grade I listed Alfred's Tower, which he regards as arguably the UK's finest folly. 
  
  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 £25 (inc. p&p, UK only) made payable to "Gwyn Headley" to:

  • Folly Book Offer
    22 Mount View Road
    London N4 4HX