Alfred's Tower, Stourhead, Wiltshire |
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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.
- 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: