Folly history bristles (as it should) with thorny queries. Just as no one can account for the ninteenth - century revival of interest in tilting (Sir Walter's Disease; said Mark Twain), no one really knows why a certain man will devote twenty years to surfacing he house with crockery shards and teapot lids; no one can fully share the squires impulse to retire to his own Toad Hall, or somebody's longing for a battlemented bicycle shed at the bottom of his garden, or something very nasty to gothicize his woodshed.

Page 11, Follies, Ed Sir Hugh Casson.