A folly is the sort of building that makes you stop the car. It stands on a hill with no obvious reason for being there, too grand for a shed and far too small to live in, and it has been standing there, patiently, for two centuries. Plenty of people meet their first folly without ever learning the word for it.
At its simplest, a folly is a building with no serious practical purpose — or a purpose so modest that a plain shed would have done the job just as well. It was built for pleasure, for prestige, or for one patron's private whim, and it usually cost a great deal more than it needed to.
Four tests that usually apply
Follies come in a bewildering range of shapes, which is why definitions wobble. Most of the buildings we cheerfully call follies pass at least two or three of these tests.
- No real job to do. Or a job so slight — a viewpoint, a place to sit, a bit of storage — that nobody would have built a tower to do it.
- Built to be looked at. Either admired from the big house, or used as a place from which to admire the view. Often both at once.
- One person's idea. Not a committee, not a parish, not a railway company. A folly is usually the result of an individual with land, money and an enthusiasm.
- Knowingly odd. A ruin built to look romantic, a garden temple pretending to be Greek, a castle where no castle was needed.
None of these is law, and the boundary is genuinely blurred. Some follies have a small secret function: the House in the Clouds at Thorpeness was a water tower dressed up as a house, and any number of garden towers quietly doubled as dovecotes. What makes them follies is that the decorative idea came first and the practical one was squeezed in afterwards.
Where the word comes from
The word comes from the French folie, meaning foolishness. In France a folie was often a smart country retreat built for pleasure rather than farming, and English borrowed the idea of a building that answered to delight rather than need. A rival theory traces it to feuillée, a leafy arbour or shelter, though that explanation is contested. Either way the emphasis is the same: pleasure, not profit. When a Georgian landowner called a building "a folly", he was not insulting it. He was admitting that it existed purely for enjoyment, and that he could afford the joke.
It is worth remembering that "folly" was not always the word used at the time. Owners and gardeners spoke of temples, ruins, towers, grottoes, eyecatchers and ornaments. "Folly" often arrived later, as a fond or slightly mocking label for buildings that had outlived their original excuse. That is why a single estate can contain a "Gothic ruin" that is really a folly, a "temple" that is really a summerhouse, and a "castle" that never had a wall thick enough to stop a determined sheep.
Why Britain is full of them
Two things happened in the eighteenth century. Wealth from trade, coal and enclosed land poured into the pockets of a relatively small number of families, and the Grand Tour sent their sons to Italy and Greece, where they acquired a taste for temples, obelisks and ruins. Back home they reshaped their parks on an ambitious scale, with help from designers such as Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. A landscape garden was not just a garden; it was a three-dimensional argument about taste, learning and money.
Follies were the punctuation marks in that argument. A temple at the end of a lake gave the eye something to rest on. A sham ruin on a ridge suggested that the family had been there for centuries, even if the money was new. A tall tower could be seen from the house and offered a view back over the estate, which was really a view of one's own cleverness. The result was a countryside dotted with buildings that looked ancient, foreign or romantic, but were usually brand new and deliberately artificial.
The fashion did not stop in the eighteenth century. Victorian landowners built follies for many of the same reasons, though often with a heavier dose of eccentricity. William Beckford's enormous Fonthill Abbey was a Gothic fantasy that collapsed more than once under the weight of its own ambition. Broadway Tower in Worcestershire, completed in 1799, was supposedly built partly so that its owner could see whether a beacon would be visible from his home many miles away — an excuse so thin that it has become one of the classic folly stories. In the twentieth century, the impulse survived in buildings such as the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster, a domed Edwardian extravagance that is grander than any practical purpose could justify.
A short tour of folly types
If you start looking for follies, you will soon notice that they come in families. These are the most common characters you will meet.
- Garden temples. Small classical buildings with columns and pediments, usually dedicated to Venus, Pan or Bacchus, and used for picnics, conversation and pretending to be in Italy.
- Sham ruins. Walls, arches and broken towers built to look ancient. Some were genuine ruins tidied up; many were constructed from scratch with carefully placed gaps and ivy.
- Towers and prospect towers. Built for the view, or simply to be a view. A few have a room at the top for tea, which is the most civilised excuse for a tower ever invented.
- Obelisks and monuments. Often commemorative, but frequently so large and isolated that they behave like follies whether they meant to or not.
- Grottoes and shell houses. Caves lined with shells, minerals and mirrors, designed to be cool, dark and theatrical.
- Castles and mock fortresses. Battlements, turrets and gatehouses where no defence was ever needed.
- Cottage orné and ornamental farm buildings. Cowsheds and cottages dressed up as picturesque cottages, because even agriculture had to look good from the terrace.
The Dunmore Pineapple in Scotland is a famous example of the last category: a garden building with an enormous stone pineapple on top, originally connected to a hot-house where real tropical fruit was grown. It is absurd, practical and beautiful all at once, which is roughly the folly recipe.
Folly or not? A few awkward cases
Not every strange old building is a folly. A windmill, a lighthouse, a dovecote or a gamekeeper's lodge may look romantic now, but it was built to do a job. The test is not whether a building is odd or old, but whether its original purpose was primarily practical or primarily pleasurable. If the answer is "a bit of both", you are probably looking at a folly with a secret.
There are also buildings that began as follies and later became useful. The House in the Clouds is the obvious example: the water tank was hidden inside a house, and the house was raised high to give the tank pressure. The decorative disguise came first, or at least the patron insisted on it. That is the spirit of folly — not uselessness for its own sake, but usefulness made to wear a costume.
Why follies still matter
Follies are often overlooked because they are small, private and a little silly. But they are remarkably revealing. They show what people did with money when they were not trying to be sensible, and they record the moment when a landscape was designed to be read as well as farmed. They also survive as some of the most atmospheric buildings in Britain: half-hidden in woods, stranded on hills, reflected in lakes, and usually just far enough from the car park to feel like a discovery.
Many are now in the care of the National Trust, the Landmark Trust, Historic England or local charities, and a few can be rented for holidays. Others remain on private land, visible from a footpath, quietly doing nothing in particular. That is the point. A folly is a building that has been given permission to exist for no better reason than delight — and after two hundred years, that still feels like a small act of rebellion.
Photo: Cao135 / Pixabay
