Client:- Flounders Folly Trust
Project:- Flounders Folly
Four interpretation panels mounted in the castellated top of the 80 feet high tower, situated on Callow Hill Shropshire.
The panels show a 360° view of the surrounding hills which are annotated and linked to a legend and compass. Accuracy was crucial here as every detail and feature of the landscape had to be in correct proportion and scale within the watercolours.
Although Flounders’ Folly is a familiar Shropshire landmark, its story is not well known. The Folly is a stone tower, 16 feet square and 80 feet high, standing on Callow Hill, near Craven Arms in South Shropshire. It is a Grade II listed building and a much loved local landmark.
Benjamin Flounders, a Yorkshireman from a Quaker background inherited the estate at Culmington in South Shropshire and built the tower with local stone and local labour in 1838. The site marks the point at which three parishes and four major estates meet.
Curiously, Benjamin Flounders never had a house on the Culmington estate and generally chose to stay at the Angel Inn in Broad Street, Ludlow on his twice-yearly visits to Shropshire.
There are various stories as to his reasons for building the tower. These vary from a theory that he wanted to create work for the unemployed to the rather fanciful idea that he hoped to be able to watch his ships on the Mersey and the Bristol Channel! It was however the year of his 70th birthday and he may have built it just to celebrate that and to leave his mark on the Shropshire landscape.
