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

“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.