The Follies of the Rame Peninsula

My holiday trip was to what I now know is called ‘The Forgotten Corner of Cornwall’ – the quarter of the county south and east of Liskeard where hardly anyone now bothers to go. My first full day was spent exploring the Rame Peninsula in more or less dull and drizzly weather, a tiny area yet packed with interesting bits and pieces, from the derelict Tregantle Fort to the little chapel out on Rame Head where, for some unclear reason, people leave bunches of flowers.

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-18^th-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.