The Folly Fellowship
Richard Cavendish visits an organisation devoted to architectural treats.
The hundred years after 1730 saw the great age of folly building in Britain. That was the time of 'Gothick' towers, peculiar pyramids and pagodas, sham monasteries, artistically crumbling walls and arches, Druidical garden seats, shell encrusted grottoes and singularly incommodious hermitages. There was trouble with resident hermits, who ungratefully caught cold, went stark mad or kept sneaking off to the pub. Even owls, which should have haunted ivy-clad ruins, moping in the moonlight, were not invariably reliable.
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