The Most Curious Places in the United Kingdom
7 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most curious places in the United Kingdom are Broadway Tower, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and McCaig's Tower. The list covers 7 curious places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Britain is the classic home of the folly, a building made for pleasure, pride or a view rather than any practical use. Its landowners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, influenced by the landscape garden, scattered towers, temples and eccentric pavilions across their estates, and the tradition of individual eccentricity has continued in other forms, from model villages to shell-lined caves and sculpture landscapes. The result is a country dotted with structures that make visitors ask why they exist at all.
Broadway Tower, a castellated Gothic folly of 1798 on a high point of the Cotswolds, offers views over many counties and was later a retreat for William Morris. In Scotland, the Dunmore Pineapple near Airth tops a garden pavilion with a giant carved stone pineapple, a symbol of wealth and hospitality in the eighteenth century. McCaig's Tower above Oban is a ring of granite arches inspired by the Colosseum, left unfinished when its builder died. On the cliffs of County Londonderry, the Mussenden Temple, a domed rotunda built as a summer library, stands right at the edge of a drop to the Atlantic.
Other curiosities are underground or in miniature. The Shell Grotto in Margate is a set of winding chalk passages covered with millions of shells, whose origin and age remain a mystery. Bekonscot in Buckinghamshire, opened in 1929, is the oldest original model village in the world. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park sets works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and many others across the parkland of an eighteenth-century estate.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Broadway Tower | Folly | |
| 2 | Yorkshire Sculpture Park | Sculpture garden | |
| 3 | McCaig's Tower | Folly | |
| 4 | Mussenden Temple | Folly | |
| 5 | Dunmore Pineapple | Folly | |
| 6 | Shell Grotto | Folly | |
| 7 | Bekonscot | Miniature park |
01 Broadway Tower
United Kingdom52.024° N 1.836° W
The author is Newton2 (cropped by Yummifruitbat ) · CC BY 2.5 Capability Brown is credited with the idea, and James Wyatt designed it in 1794 for George Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry; it was built in 1798–1799 for his wife Barbara. One story says that Lady Coventry wanted to know whether a beacon on the hill would be visible from their home at Croome Court, about fifteen miles to the north-west — it was. Over the nineteenth century the tower led a string of unlikely lives.
Did you know? Before Cormell Price leased it in 1866, the tower was used for a time by local glove makers.
02 Yorkshire Sculpture Park
United Kingdom · 19.6 km from Leeds53.614° N 1.570° W
Michael Garlick · CC BY-SA 2.0 Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth anchor the collection, and their large bronzes sit comfortably in the open landscape. Around them works by Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, Kenneth Armitage, Nigel Hall and many others appear across the hillsides, alongside pieces by Andy Goldsworthy, Yinka Shonibare and Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose "Damski Czepek" of 2015 is cast in polyurethane resin.
Did you know? Rather than a fixed display, the park runs a changing programme of mostly single-artist exhibitions, earning it the nickname 'gallery without walls'.
03 McCaig's Tower
United Kingdom56.416° N 5.469° W
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 It was the idea of John Stuart McCaig, a wealthy banker with the North of Scotland Bank and an admirer of classical architecture, who acted as his own architect. He began building in 1897, with two aims: a permanent monument to his family, and winter work for the town's stonemasons. The plan was ambitious — a museum and art gallery inside the ring, a central tower, and statues of himself, his parents and his siblings.
Did you know? His will also set up prizes for young artists who submitted designs for new 'artistic towers' around Oban.
04 Mussenden Temple
United Kingdom · 38.2 km from Londonderry/Derry55.168° N 6.811° W
D LN · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building was never a place of worship. It was a library, with bookcases lining the walls and busts set in the dome, and a fire was kept burning in the basement so that the books would stay dry in one of the most exposed spots on the island.
Did you know? The Earl-Bishop's art collection at Downhill included works attributed to Correggio, Dürer, Murillo, Rubens and Tintoretto, and the fire of 1851 destroyed the house's library.
05 Dunmore Pineapple
United Kingdom56.077° N 3.787° W
giannandrea · CC0 The joke is carried off with great craftsmanship. Each of the stone leaves of the fruit was individually shaped and drained so that rainwater would not collect and crack it in frost, and the chimneys of the heating system were disguised as Grecian urns.
Did you know? The upper floor once held two small cottages, known as bothies, where the estate's gardeners lived beside their hothouses.
06 Shell Grotto
United Kingdom · 29 km from Dover51.388° N 1.390° E
Gernot Keller www.gernot-keller.com · CC BY-SA 2.5 The grotto was rediscovered around 1835; the earliest known account, from a newspaper of 1838, describes workmen at a cottage digging into an extensive underground space studded with shells. The layout is a serpentine passage about 70 feet long and 8 feet high, a circular rotunda with a shaft rising to daylight beneath a dome, and a rectangular chamber of roughly 15 by 20 feet, often called the altar chamber.
Did you know? A wall of the grotto was damaged by a bomb during the Second World War and had to be reconstructed.
07 Bekonscot
United Kingdom · 33.5 km from Luton51.614° N 0.645° W
Image by stgeorgemr from Pixabay The village began as the private hobby of Roland Callingham, who built a garden railway and then kept adding a world for it to run through, helped by W. A. Berry. Instead of one settlement there are several invented ones, each with its own character: Bekonscot itself, Evenlode with its new town and colliery, Epwood, Greenhaily, Hanton, Southpool and the seaside Splashyng.
Did you know? The first garden line was about 1,200 feet long; today's almost ten scale miles of track amount to roughly 400 metres in real life.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most curious places in the United Kingdom?
- On our list, Broadway Tower ranks first, followed by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and McCaig's Tower.
- What is a folly?
- A folly is a building constructed mainly for decoration or effect, often in a landscape garden, rather than for practical use. Many imitate ruins, temples, towers or exotic forms.
- Who made the Shell Grotto in Margate?
- No one knows. It was discovered in 1835, and theories about its origin range from an ancient temple to an elaborate Georgian or Regency folly. Its walls and ceilings are covered with about 4.6 million shells.
- Why is there a giant pineapple at Dunmore?
- In the 18th century pineapples were a rare and costly fruit grown in heated hothouses, and so a symbol of wealth and status. The stone pineapple crowned a summer house in the walled garden of the Earl of Dunmore's estate.
- How many curious places are on this list in the United Kingdom?
- The list covers 7 curious places.