Folly is an endless maze, tangled roots perplex her ways.

Blake

Few follies are as absolutely useless as their strict definition requires.

Page 189, Eccentric Britain.

It is folly to linger in this manner. I will not torment myself any longer by remaining among friends whose society it is impossible for me now to enjoy.

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen.

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.

Some of us take for granted are usually monuments to human foolishness; flimsy prisons that have failed to save daughters from abduction, bosoms from asps, and sons - and heirs from vengeful witches.

Page 8, Follies, Ed Sir Hugh Casson.

There are many 'borderline' follies, for the simple reason that no all-embracing definition of a folly exists. Follyhood has to be felt as well as seen.

Page 8, Follies, Ed Sir Hugh Casson.





Painting by Paul Brason
http://www.paulbrason.co.uk/index.htm

Not every foolishly - conceived building is a folly, of course, nor is every folly pointless, gemcrack or tasteless.

Page 8, Follies, Ed Sir Hugh Casson.

Almost anyone, almost anywhere is liable at any time to come upon a forgotten, nameless, but undoubtedly man-man structure with that over solemnity, raffishness, hint of menace, or glaring inappropriateness that mark it as a folly.

Page 8, Follies, Ed Sir Hugh Casson.

Let nobody please bother to ask 'What is it for?' For to that question there is only one answer. The mark of a true folly is that it was errected simply to satisfy and give pleasure to it's builder and to use Sansovino's words 'greatly surprize the stranger'. There could be not better aim or epitaph for any buildings, nor, for any publication.

Foreword, Follies, Ed Sir Hugh Casson.

Of Folly buildings

“What was chosen for what site in what style, depended on taste, place, money, materials and fashion; success was as capricious as fashion”
Page 33 F & G

In making the attempt to define the undefineable, many scholars have tended to overlook the element of eccentricity, which is an integral part of every folly builders personality.

Monumental Follies, Stuart Barton.

“Influence is a sufficiently difficult word to use of professionals, who, one can be reasonably certain, do see another’s work. But with follies, everything is so unsure; Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor and Kent built some of the very earliest follies, and then the amateurs largely took over, and who knows what they saw and worked for, with whose aid and how; it is easy to oversimplify, and follies are by no means simple but the result of many fuddled ‘influences’.”

“With good luck, the builder might be a man of great taste and imagination, and become a specialist, with bad luck, the thing fell down”

Follies fragility.
Page 2 F & G.

Follies were built with the directness and complexity of a doodle on the blotting pad!

Page 36, Follies and Grottoes, Barbara Jones.

“They are cut off from worldly contacts and loose all humanity, becoming more mineral than artefact, resolving into stones again.”

Of buildings named follies

Page 3, Follies & Grottoes, Barbara Jones.

Folly n. a popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder.
Oxford English Dictionary

Folly n. silliness or weakness of mind: a foolish thing: sin: a monument of folly, as a great useless structure, or one left unfinished, having been begun without a reckoning of the cost. To act with folly. Origin French folie – foolish.
Chambers English Dictionary

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen includes a dog called Folly.

Mrs Selwyn was frequently away on her travels for weeks at a time, or was about her business, seeing to the numerous flats she let in town and in nearby villages. As long as the weather permitted, Dr Selwyn liked to be out of doors, and especially in the flint-built hermitage in a remote corner of the garden, which he called his folly and which he had furnished with the essentials.

Page 10, The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald.

A little hobby of mine; which gives me a strange feeling of satisfaction; mainly upon finding them. Displaced from their original context I would imagine they seem meaningless. I don't imagine they appear of any interest, however this page gives me a means of storing them.