a Grand Tour in Surrey [pt 1]

One of my favourite books is Headley & Meulenkamp's Directory of UK Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings¹. It's a delightful book that has provided me with many hours of fun, reading about funny and obscure buildings in all sorts of unlikely corners of the country, built by all sorts of wonderfully eccentric people. I could write pages and pages of blog posts about these places and the people that built them, and maybe one day I will, but today I am going to write about the place I visited on Tuesday, Painshill Park.

Painshill Park has one of the UK's largest collections of folly buildings all in one place, and had long been on my list of places to visit (along with many other intriguing places). Earlier this year, I mentioned to Nikki that I wanted to see some of these follies, and discovered she wanted to visit some, too, so we put together a list of places to see. We tried to see a couple on the day we had lunch at the Fat Duck, but both of them are no longer accessible to the general public, so we came away disappointed. Thankfully, Painshill Park is open to the public daily, for the reasonable price of £6.60, and we discovered that it's absolutely delightful, although it's fairly well-named, as there are quite a few hills and they are a pain — especially if you have a pushchair with a heavy baby in it, as Nikki did!

The park was the 35 year project of the Hon. Charles Hamilton, ninth (youngest) son of the Earl of Abercorn. Like many of his contemporaries, Charles made a Grand Tour of Europe, and returned in 1738 with equally grand ideas of recreating in reality the sort of pastoral landscapes that had been popularised by artists of the day, such as Nicolas Poussin. He bought 200 acres of unpromising land at Cobham in Surrey and spent the next 35 years turning it into one of the finest gardens in England, until the age of 71 when he was forced to sell the estate, having been crippled by debts and arthritis. The estate was split up after WW2, and neglected until 1981 when Elmbridge Borough Council managed to buy up 158 acres of the original estate, and set up Painshill Park Trust to restore the estate to much of its original glory. The restoration work is still ongoing.

The entire historic route between all the follies is about two and a half miles long, but feels like more, because of the aforementioned hills. None of them are very high, but most of them are very steep, and paths wind in a meandering manner, and some of the distances between follies seem very long indeed. The Gothic prospect tower at the far end of the estate — which you can see from the motorway as it overlooks the A3 — is much further away from everything else than it looks on the map they provide when you buy your ticket, and the route is all uphill. However, there are some stunning high views across the Surrey countryside; one at the top of the prospect tower and one at the site of the Temple of Bacchus (which is just as well at that point, because there isn't much else to see just there). You certainly need a few hours to really appreciate everything — we were there for about five hours and we still missed seeing the Hermitage and the Keyhole Plantation.

As there are so many things to see, and writing about them all will take time, I'm going to break it up into separate posts. Look for more on Painshill Park tomorrow! In the meantime, I'll leave you with some photos (I haven't uploaded them all yet):

¹ I've had my copy since the most recent printing came out in 2003, although most of the information dates back to 1999, and some seems to date back even further to the previous edition from 1986, which means some of the information is out of date now, but I still recommend picking up a copy if you can find one. For more information, check out the Folly Fellowship, too.