Follies and Monkeys

The Oxford English Dictionary gives one of the definitions of "folly" as "a popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder." A particular type of folly became popular in England in the 18th and 19th centuries: small buildings on an estate in an attempt to mimic a style of architecture that was currently trendy, but not actually contemporary: the fake Roman temple, the gatehouse designed to look like a medieval guard tower, the romantic grotto.  I've always been charmed by these.  There's just something so innocently enthusiastic about them.  In particular, I'm sad that Alexander Pope's grotto was destroyed by bombing during World War Two, because listen to this description of it from one of his letters: I have put the last hand to my works…happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto: I then found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thru’ the Cavern day and night. …When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture…And when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular Forms…at which when a Lamp…is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the place. How great is that?  But my very, very favorite type of folly is the Sham Ruin.  The sham ruin is built already falling down, to sort of make it look authentic, as if it were really built in the middle ages and has just been sitting there all along.  It's especially sweet when it's a sham Greek or Roman ruin in the middle of the English countryside.  A for effort, guys! When I visited the Brighton Pavillion a few years ago, my very best gift shop purchase was the book (or really, more of a long pamphlet) Follies by Jeffery Whitelaw.  So when I wanted a folly for In for a Penny, I paged through and found the absolute perfect thing, the cutest folly I've EVER seen. Mow Cop Castle, ladies and gentlemen: The picture in my book shows a girl leaning against that rightmost edge of wall.  She takes up about 7 of those rows of stone.  That thing is HUGE.  Here's how I described it in the book: It sat on an outcrop of rock at the top of the hill: a round, squat tower with the roof gone from the upper floor.  A broken wall and a great arch sprouted out of its side and straggled down the hill.  It was much larger than she had expected--thirty feet high, at least.  It was absurd and enormous and she quite irrationally thought it was the most adorable thing she had ever seen. What do you think, did I capture it at all? You can find lots of beautiful photos of Mow Cop Castle at their site, but my favorite picture that I found while researching was this one:

From this website, in which someone took their stuffed monkey on tour.  I enjoyed it especially because my friend Beth and I once spent the day doing something similar with a stuffed orangutan my friend Paul gave me.  I think we were inspired by the gnome in Amelie?  Admittedly we didn't so much go on a roadtrip as we drove around Eugene, Oregon, because we were college students home on vacation:

I went ahead and uploaded the rest of the pictures to my flickr.  The album's here if you want to see what I thought was absolutely hilarious at age 20.  (Okay, I'm not gonna lie, I still think most of them are hilarious...) Have you ever done a ridiculous photoshoot?  Tell me about it! ~~~~~ Rose Lerner's debut novel, the Regency Historical In For a Penny, is now available.  You can hear Rose and I discussing life, Jane Austen, Captain Kirk, and more on Romantically Speaking Episode 7.

Tagged as: Guest, Romance, Romantically Speaking Podcast