Follies and Other Buildings

My long walk a week ago last Monday brought me to Twizel Castle, just over the Tweed into Northumberland. This was not long before the strain of walking against a 45-mph wind began to cause problems to the ligaments of my left knee, but at that stage I was still agile enough to hop over the fence (which you are NOT SUPPOSED TO DO) and look around the ruin. As I sat with a cup of tea I discovered from the detritus around that I had not been the only one to risk it. Twizel looks like a medieval castle, but isn't. It owes its ruinous state to the fact that it was never finished: built over the course of fifty years in the mid-1700s, nobody ever lived in it.

It was a far nicer day when I saw Hume Castle. This is a genuine relic of the Middle Ages, but not much is left from that time: the shell you see now is a modern restoration of an 18th-century reconstruction of a medieval castle, so it's really as much a folly as Twizel. 

Twizel and Hume are hard to miss, but I was surprised that so many other follisome structures I came across have not found their way into the tome to which all of us who are interested in such things turn, Headley & Meulenkamp's Follies. The Temple of the Muses at Dryburgh was erected in 1814 in honour of the Roxburghshire poet James Thomson, but although Headley & Meulenkamp mention the statue of William Wallace not far away, the Temple they never found:

On the way to the Temple from Dryburgh Abbey I also spotted the castellated Stirling Towers with their date-stone of 1818 (those are miniature cannons poking around the top), and a wonderfully OTT gateway which leads into an empty field: 

When I parked up by a little picnic site next to the A697 to look at the Mermaid's Well there in front of me was another folly gateway which doesn't appear to lead anywhere, if it ever did. There's no big house locally that it would have led to: its presence is as unexplained as the Mermaid's Well itself.

How this ordinary row of 19th-century houses beside the main road in Wooler came to have a castellated gable-end is anyone's guess, too.

I also achieved a long ambition of visiting Yester Castle. Some years ago I tried to reach it in the company of Lady Arlen but we were defeated by horribly boggy ground: this time I approached via the footpath from Gifford village. My theory had been that the walks along the steep-sided valley of the Gifford Water had been laid out to provide a walk to the Castle ruins and an appropriately Gothic experience for visitors to Yester House, in the manner of 'Gothic Gardens' further to the south (it's the only Scottish site of this kind I know of yet). My suspicions were confirmed by the artificial way the paths wind around the stream, and the two beautiful rustic bridges which have been built, entirely superfluously, to provide an additional thrill.

Finally, after a lot of winding to and fro through the woods, you reach the Castle. This medieval ruin was abandoned in the 16th century (though the falconer of the Hays of Gifford continued to live in it until the mid-1700s), and it's hard to see clearly, but it has a unique feature that sends an intentional shiver down the spine of the Gothic visitor. This is the semi-subterranean Goblin Ha', constructed in the time of Sir Hugo de Gifford allegedly - because, so the story goes, nobody could work out how such a marvel was built otherwise - with the aid of supernatural beings he summoned from the Underworld. You can't go in, but you can look through a grille at it, and even from that distance it has a genuinely nasty feel to it, as though something disagreeable has happened there. 

Opposite that row of houses in Wooler is a folly of a different sort. The Ryecroft Hotel was definitely there by 1954 but I don't know whether its brand of brick-and-concrete stripped Art Deco comes from the late 1930s or the early 1950s. The ten-bed hotel closed in 2012 and the building has been mouldering since then; in 2016 the purchasers were complaining that their planning applications were being repeatedly turned down, and that their insurers would insist on the hotel being boarded up, as it now is. It looks dreadful, and I suspect - though one local estate agent has a plan on their website for its redevelopment that incorporates the entrance and facade - its fate will be gradual decay until demolition becomes the only option.