folie

Folly in its garden sense — a whimsical or extravagant structure built purely for visual effect, with no practical purpose — comes from Old French folie, meaning madness, foolishness, or extravagant delight. The French word derived from fou (mad, foolish), ultimately from Latin follis (a leather bag, a bellows, something inflated with air). The metaphor traveled from inflated leather to empty-headed to delightful excess: by the medieval period, folie could describe both genuine madness and the pleasurable abandon of festive celebration. The English borrowed folly from this second sense — the thing that is done for pure irrational pleasure, without utility, without excuse.

The garden folly as a distinct type emerged in the English landscape movement of the 18th century, when wealthy landowners began constructing deliberately picturesque buildings in their grounds to provide focal points in the designed landscape and to suggest the melancholy pleasures of antiquity. Gothic ruins, fake hermitages, Egyptian pyramids, classical temples, Chinese pagodas, and Turkish tents appeared in the parklands of English estates — each designed to evoke a mood rather than serve a function. The hermitage sometimes came with a genuine hermit, hired to inhabit it for seven years, who was forbidden to cut his hair, nails, or beard and required to maintain the atmosphere of solitary contemplation for any visiting guests.

The greatest period of folly construction in England ran from roughly 1720 to 1830, and the most celebrated follies are architectural confections of startling ambition. Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, built by the fabulously wealthy William Beckford from 1796 onward, was a neo-Gothic abbey tower over 90 meters tall — built too quickly with inadequate foundations, it collapsed in 1825. The King Alfred's Tower at Stourhead is a genuine triangular tower 50 meters high, built in 1772 as a folly. The Sanderson Miller at Radway in Warwickshire built a mock-medieval castle from which the actual Battle of Edgehill (1642) could be surveyed — a fake ruin overlooking a real one.

Follies were not restricted to England, though England remains their homeland. Irish landlords built their own follies — including the remarkable Conolly's Folly in County Kildare, an obelisk-topped arch constructed in 1740 specifically to provide employment for starving laborers during a hard winter, while appearing to be purely decorative. This double function — the folly as disguised charity — complicates the simple definition. The French folie des grandeurs (delusion of grandeur) names the psychological condition that follies seem to express; the actual follies often served more complicated purposes than pure vanity.