The last stop of the day was the Mount Edgecumbe Country
Park. This time of the year the House and the formal gardens around it are
closed, but you can wander the rest of the landscape and view its follies
almost at will. On reading the description of Mount Edgecumbe some years ago I
toyed with adding it to my original list of Gothic Gardens, but decided it
didn’t quite fit the bill: it is essentially a landscape with follies scattered
around it, rather than a topography tweaked and exploited to provide thrilling
experiences of the Sublime in which follies may play an organising part. At
Edgecumbe the structures frame basically peaceful views out over the Plymouth
Sound. The Ruin is a nice, and in fact extremely convincing, mid-18th-century
folly; Milton’s Temple provides a note of Classical tranquillity next to a lawn
and pool; though I rather like the little viewpoints, Picklecombe and Red
Seats, the former apparently cobbled together from Gothic architectural junk,
the latter a sort of fake Roman ruin made from slate and stone. But, as I say,
not really a Gothic landscape, though it could have become one with the right
imagination and will.
Before trudging round Edgecumbe I’d stopped at Penlee Point
to investigate a couple of tiny features on the map. At the edge of a wood the
Ordnance Survey described a ‘Folly Tower (in ruins)’. All I could find at the site
was a circular stump of mortared stonework some three feet across and eighteen
inches high, half-swallowed by ferns. That meant I wasn’t expecting much as I
toiled down the hill to find what the map insisted was a ‘Grotto’.
Instead, despite such scepticism, my effort was rewarded by
a quite stunning structure built onto the cliff wall, consisting of a tunnel
leading to an arched chamber with openings looking out over the waters of the
Channel. It has an impressive bleakness: there is about it not the slightest
flicker of Rococo finesse, and you wonder not only at the effort that went into
its construction but also the thinking behind it. It’s hardly a place for
comfortable contemplation as the winds scour its archways and angles. Yet
somebody comes here: there was a bunch of yellow tulips quite recently
deposited. I gather from the Interweb that the building goes by the name of
Queen Adelaide’s Grotto, and may belong to the Edgecumbe family of follies as
the whole Rame Peninsula was originally part of the estate, but beyond that I’m
in the dark as to its history.
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