The Most Remarkable Follies in the World
14 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable follies in the world are Broadway Tower (United Kingdom), Palace of Fine Arts (United States) and Swallow's Nest (Ukraine). The list covers 14 follies in 5 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A folly is a building whose look promises more than its use delivers: a tower with nothing to guard, a temple with no cult, a ruin that was never whole. Most were raised as eye-catchers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape parks, where a silhouette on the skyline mattered more than rooms inside. The best of them are pure architecture of mood, built to be seen from a distance and to make a view or a hilltop feel like a scene from a painting.
The collection spans several kinds of eccentricity. Broadway Tower crowns a ridge in the Cotswolds as a castle-like lookout designed by James Wyatt. Mussenden Temple, a domed rotunda modelled on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, stands at the very edge of a cliff above the Atlantic coast of Northern Ireland. The Dunmore Pineapple in Scotland tops a garden pavilion with a carved stone fruit. In France, the postman Ferdinand Cheval spent decades building the Palais Idéal from stones he picked up on his rounds, while across the Atlantic the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco survives as a Roman ruin dreamed up for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
Every folly here was chosen for how it looks and the list is ordered by beauty. Each has its own description, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Broadway Tower | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 2 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | United States | |
| 3 | Swallow's Nest | Castle | Ukraine | |
| 4 | McCaig's Tower | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 5 | Mussenden Temple | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Dunmore Pineapple | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 7 | Palais Idéal | Folly | France | |
| 8 | Villa Palagonia | Folly | Italy | |
| 9 | Bishop Castle | Folly | United States | |
| 10 | Shell Grotto | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 11 | Grotto of the Redemption | Folly | United States | |
| 12 | House on the Rock | Folly | United States | |
| 13 | Désert de Retz | Folly | France | |
| 14 | Pagoda of Chanteloup | Folly | France |
01 Broadway Tower
United Kingdom52.024° N 1.836° W
The author is Newton2 (cropped by Yummifruitbat ) · CC BY 2.5 Broadway Tower stands on Broadway Hill, at 1,024 ft (312 m) the second-highest point of the Cotswolds, and the views from its roof are the reason to climb it. The tower is a romantic sham castle of honey-coloured limestone ashlar, about 65 ft (20 m) tall: hexagonal, with three round turrets, battlements and gargoyles. Although it is usually called a folly, it is a proper building with rooms on four floors, spiral stairs in two of its turrets and a viewing platform on the roof.
Did you know? Sir Thomas Phillipps printed so much here that the tower was nicknamed the "Lighthouse of Wisdom".
02 Palace of Fine Arts
United States · 4.8 km from San Francisco37.803° N 122.448° W
Kevin Cole ( en:User:Kevinlcole ) · CC BY 2.0 The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was meant to look like a ruin from the start. Bernard Maybeck designed it for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 as a quiet place between the crowded fairgrounds and the art galleries, and he took his cue from an etching by Piranesi of a ruined Roman temple and from Arnold Böcklin's painting Isle of the Dead. The result is an open rotunda about 50 metres high, set beside a lagoon and flanked by a long curving colonnade, crowned by sculptures of weeping women.
Did you know? It is the only structure from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition still standing on its original site.
03 Swallow's Nest
Ластівчине гніздо
Ukraine · 8 km from Yalta44.431° N 34.129° E
Image by IrinaKushnikova from Pixabay The current Neo-Gothic villa perched on Aurora Cliff, 40 metres above the Black Sea, went up in 1911–1912 for the oil baron Pavel von Steingel, designed by the architect Leonid Sherwood to look like a fantasy of a medieval keep rather than function as one. It replaced an earlier, flimsier structure — the site had already been considered worth building on before anyone had reinforced the cliff underneath it.
Did you know? For all its fame, the castle is tiny: about 20 metres long and 10 metres wide.
04 McCaig's Tower
United Kingdom56.416° N 5.469° W
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Above the harbour of Oban, on Battery Hill, stands something that looks at first like a Roman amphitheatre dropped onto a Scottish hilltop. McCaig's Tower is a great ring of granite, roughly 200 m round, pierced by two tiers of slender lancet arches — 44 below and 50 above — that frame the sky from inside and the sea from outside. It was built from Bonawe granite quarried across Airds Bay on Loch Etive, and it dominates the Oban skyline from every approach, whether by road, rail or the ferries that come and go below.
Did you know? McCaig, an admirer of Greek and Roman architecture, modelled his tower on the Colosseum in Rome.
05 Mussenden Temple
United Kingdom · 38.2 km from Londonderry/Derry55.168° N 6.811° W
D LN · CC BY-SA 4.0 A small domed rotunda stands alone on the lip of a basalt cliff above the Atlantic on the north coast of Northern Ireland, and it looks as if it has been set down there by mistake. It was built in the early 1780s for Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry, a restless traveller and builder remembered simply as the Earl-Bishop. The design, attributed to the architect Michael Shanahan, who went with Hervey on his Italian journeys, follows the circular temples of antiquity: the Earl-Bishop's own notes point to Bramante's Tempietto in Rome, itself a descendant of the round Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.
Did you know? The temple was first conceived as a gift for Frideswide Mussenden, the sister of Henry Bruce, the cousin who later inherited the whole Downhill estate.
06 Dunmore Pineapple
United Kingdom56.077° N 3.787° W
giannandrea · CC0 The Dunmore Pineapple is the most outrageous garden building in Scotland: a classical pavilion topped by a stone pineapple some 14 metres high, rising from the wall of an eighteenth-century walled garden near Airth. It was the creation of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore. The date 1761 is carved on the keystone of the arched doorway, the year the hothouse and garden were built; the pineapple cupola itself is believed to have been added after the earl returned from Virginia, where he had served as governor, after 1776. The design has often been attributed to Sir William Chambers, though no signature confirms it.
Did you know? Its overall height, from the base of the building to the tip of the stone fruit, is exactly half the width of the whole structure.
07 Palais Idéal
France45.256° N 5.029° E
Image by Olzheim from Pixabay Ferdinand Cheval was a rural postman walking a roughly 30-kilometre daily round through the French countryside near Hauterives when, in April 1879, he tripped on an oddly shaped stone. He later wrote that he pocketed it, went back the next day for more, and somewhere in that habit a plan formed that he couldn't shake: to build, alone, the palace he kept seeing in his head — modelled loosely on temples and monuments he'd only ever encountered as engravings in the postcards and illustrated magazines that passed through his own delivery bag.
Did you know? Three giant figures about 10.5 metres tall, named Vercingetorix, Archimedes and Julius Caesar, are not just sculpture but hold up the Barbary Tower.
08 Villa Palagonia
Italy · 15.3 km from Palermo38.080° N 13.511° E
Jpbazard Jean-Pierre Bazard · CC BY-SA 3.0 Along the garden wall of Villa Palagonia sits a crowd of stone creatures: dwarfs, musicians, beasts with human faces and figures that belong to no species at all. They gave the house its popular name, the Villa of Monsters, and turned an elegant Sicilian Baroque residence into one of the strangest sights of the Grand Tour.
Did you know? The prince behind the monsters, Ferdinando Francesco II Gravina, was nicknamed 'the Necromancer', yet he served as chamberlain to the King of Naples.
09 Bishop Castle
United States38.062° N 105.094° W
Matt Trush · CC BY-SA 3.0 Bishop Castle is what happens when one person refuses to stop building. In 1969 Jim Bishop started laying up a stone cottage on his plot in the Wet Mountains of southern Colorado; by 1973 it had become a castle, and he kept going, largely alone and without formal plans, for the rest of his working life. The result, at more than 9,000 feet among the pines of the San Isabel National Forest, is often described as the largest one-man construction project in the world: a tangle of rough stone walls, towers and turrets whose tallest spire rises more than 160 feet above the ground.
Did you know? The fire-breathing dragon on the facade is made from cut-apart stainless steel warming trays salvaged from a Pueblo hospital kitchen.
10 Shell Grotto
United Kingdom · 29 km from Dover51.388° N 1.390° E
Gernot Keller www.gernot-keller.com · CC BY-SA 2.5 Beneath an ordinary street in Margate, a narrow chalk passage leads down to rooms whose walls, arches and dome are covered entirely in shells — about 4.6 million of them, set into some 2,000 square feet of mosaic of stars, flowers, spirals and symbols no one has convincingly explained. Nobody knows who made the Shell Grotto, or when, or why.
Did you know? The flat winkles that fill most of the background are found mainly west of Southampton and are rare on the Kent coast.
11 Grotto of the Redemption
United States42.964° N 94.446° W
Ben Franske · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nine connected grottos of concrete encrusted with stones, crystals, shells, fossils and petrifications fill a full city block in the small Iowa farm town of West Bend. Each grotto frames a scene from the life of Christ, and the whole is believed to be the largest man-made grotto of its kind in the world. It is often described as the most complete collection of minerals, fossils, shells and petrifications ever assembled in one place.
Did you know? A stalagmite weighing about 2,200 pounds, brought from Carlsbad Caverns, sits near the top of the Sermon on the Mount scene.
12 House on the Rock
United States43.100° N 90.136° W
Ruscoe · Public domain The House on the Rock, near Spring Green in southern Wisconsin, is less a house than a labyrinth of one man's imagination. Alex Jordan Jr. began building on top of Deer Shelter Rock, a sandstone column rising above the forest, in the 1940s, later installing an electric hoist to lift materials. He opened it to paying visitors in 1959, and kept adding for three decades; the complex that exists today is a sprawling succession of rooms, streets and halls filled with the strangest collections in America.
13 Désert de Retz
France · 13.4 km from Versailles48.893° N 2.016° E
Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0 A house built inside the stump of a broken column of impossible size is the image that has drawn painters, surrealists and presidents to the Désert de Retz. The "Colonne détruite" stands as if it were the last fragment of a colossal ruined temple, yet it was built as a house, and its owner made it his main residence. It is the centrepiece of one of the most extraordinary gardens of late 18th-century France, laid out on the northern edge of the Forest of Marly, in the commune of Chambourcy west of Paris.
Did you know? The broken column measures about 15 metres across and rises some 25 metres at its highest jagged edge.
14 Pagoda of Chanteloup
Pagode de Chanteloup
France · 20.4 km from Tours47.391° N 0.970° E
Manfred Heyde , · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the edge of the forest of Amboise, a slender tower of pale stone rises in seven diminishing tiers above a half-moon sheet of water. The Pagoda of Chanteloup, about 44 metres tall, is one of the finest garden follies to survive from eighteenth-century France: a Chinese fantasy in outline, yet in every detail of its columns, ironwork and ornament a work of pure Louis XVI classicism. It is almost all that remains of the Château de Chanteloup, an estate once compared by contemporaries to Versailles.
Did you know? The dedication stone records the tower's height as 120½ old French feet and its summit as 95 toises above sea level.
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 is a folly in architecture?
- A folly is a building made mainly for decoration, whose form suggests a purpose it does not really have, such as a sham castle, temple or ruin. They were especially popular in English and French landscape gardens of the eighteenth century.
- What is the most remarkable folly in the world?
- On our list, Broadway Tower (United Kingdom) ranks first, followed by Palace of Fine Arts (United States) and Swallow's Nest (Ukraine).
- Which country has the most follies?
- In our collection, the most come from the United Kingdom (5), the United States (4) and France (3).
- Who built the Palais Idéal?
- The Palais Idéal in Hauterives, France, was built by Ferdinand Cheval, a rural postman, from stones he collected along his delivery route. He worked on it alone for over thirty years, and it is now a classic of naive architecture.
- How many follies are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 14 follies in 5 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 5.