Follies and Grottoes

      In 1974 we bought Pear Tree Court, a house on the banks of the Harbourne River at Harbertonford between Totnes and Kingsbridge, in South Devon. It was a pretty, Gothic house, its principal disadvantage being that it was so far from London (about 200 miles) that we practically had to bribe our friends to come for the weekend. It also had a rather forbidding wall surrounding it which gave the impression that it was just about to fall on us, quaking away below, but it never did.

      Having acquired a Gothic house, our thoughts turned to a Gothic grotto. The nearest grotto to Pear Tree Court – whether it was Gothic or not was conjectural – was in what had been the park of Oldstones, a burnt-out Palladian house near Blackawton, the property of the Cholwich family, in which there were said to be two grottoes.

      The approach was by a path which led from the house through an avenue of trees to what was on this particular day a distinctly gloomy valley with three small, artificial lakes in it – nearby there was a grotto in poor condition.

      Beyond the valley there was a wood, and at its far end, in a cold and extremely exposed position, a granite plaque was set in a stone wall and inscribed with the following:

      Within a Wood unknown to Public View

      From Youth to Age a Reverend Hermit grew The Moss his Bed, the Cave His Humble Cell, His Food the Fruits, his drink the Crystal Well. Remote from Man with God he passed His Days, Pray’r all his Business, all his Pleasure Praise.

      And in the wood, at the end of a cutting, there was, it was said, the cave in which a resident hermit, the most rare of beings in such an inhospitable climate as that of Britain, spent many years holed up in order to gratify his patron, and without catching his death of cold.

      We never found this second grotto. I told Wanda that the grotto by the lake was not the sort of grotto I wanted, anyway. What I wanted was a more dotty grotto. It was almost the shortest, certainly the coldest day of the year and Wanda was sufficiently depressed to the point of not wanting a grotto at all.

      ‘Let’s go home,’ she said. We did so and I promptly went down with what was called flu, but was really nothing more than over-exposure to the elements. A short time later, when I came downstairs to begin a convalescent Christmas, it was Wanda who advanced the idea of building a dotty grotto, as if it had been her idea in the first place.

      Eventually, we decided to build a grotto that would also act as a garden shed – planning permission not being necessary at that time for garden sheds less than 12ft high, providing they had ridge roofs, 10ft with any other sort of roof. As a further insurance against the dead hand of the planner, which is inevitably set against follies, except those of their own creation, we were fortunate in being able to site it behind part of the high stone wall which would conceal it from the public eye. It would also enable us to have access to water, without which no grotto is complete, as the River Harbourne flowed conveniently close on the other side of this wall.

      The first serious discussion about it took place in the kitchen of the house the following autumn.

       2 November.

      Beautiful limpid, cloudless morning after a slight night frost. About 10.30 Mr Perring, Wanda and I sat down in the kitchen and went through the Folly Book (Follies and Grottoes by Barbara Jones, Constable, £10, an essential work for anyone foolish enough to go into the folly/grotto business).

      We are looking for a grotto I thought I saw in Barbara Jones’s book. It was Gothic, small and built of rough, uncut stones with finials sprouting from the pediment. I must have seen it in Country Life, of which I appear to have 5,000 copies in the barn. The one we eventually sketch out for ourselves on the back of an envelope is based on a dramatically scaled down version of part of the entrance to the Hell Fire Caves at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, which in its original form would necessitate the introduction of slave labour in order to get it on the go.

      Mr Perring of course immediately understands the sort of thing we have in mind. He is attracted by the great gaping entrances to the Hell Fire Caves with blackness behind, like the way into the lair of the Minotaur; but since our entire folly will only be about 6ft wide, such an entrance would leave no space for niches in the frontage, besides being rather draughty.

      Eventually we agreed. Niches inside and out, slate ceiling. All to be filled with shell motifs; a marble head – Neptune, lion, satyr or whatever spouting water into a basin lined with variegated pebbles, from which it runs back into the river. Floored with egg-shaped stones from the beach at Branscombe, between Beer and Seaton. Chesil Bank, a 16-mile long beach of shingle with a clay foundation, between Bridport and the Isle of Portland, is too far away. God knows where we shall find the shells – we shall probably need thousands. Outside, ridge slate roof, masked by pediment with four rough finials to simulate living rock. The whole thing to be 7ft high, 6ft wide with a 3ft door and 7ft deep.

      Mr Perring is a retired stonemason. He can do anything with stone except bend it and he knows how to make those huge stone balls that balance on pillars at the gates of the grander sorts of houses and occasionally fall on delivery vans. He is still a demon for work and not unnaturally thinks the country has gone to the dogs; if one accepts his standards of activity it is difficult not to agree with him. His immediate reaction is to mend a thing rather than ‘replace the unit’. Consequently he never throws anything away as ‘it might come in useful’.

      He is also a vegetable gardener of near, if not actual, genius and he has won more cups for his vegetables than anyone else in these parts – there is a Perring Cup to be competed for by the less inspired.

      Above all he is a man of natural taste, especially in anything to do with building – the country towns and villages in this part of the world are the results of the labours of generations of such men, now mostly dead and gone.

      Mr Perring was chafing to begin and I was dispatched forthwith (from now on my role was no more than that of a drudge) to buy materials – just to be getting on with, and it didn’t go far – 5cwt sand, 2 sackfuls shingle, 2 sacks cement and a packet of chalk to mark the outline of the building on the back wall. We already had some dark limestone left over from rebuilding the porch, which would see us through for a bit.

      By the end of the second day he/we had the foundations in, reinforced with bed-bars that Mr Perring found in a hedge. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘Never throw anything away. You never know when it might come in handy.’ And then, looking at a sky full of leaden clouds, he added: ‘If it rains we’ll be stugged.’

      It didn’t and we weren’t, and the next day he began to lay the first courses