The Most Remarkable Follies in Europe
10 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable follies in Europe are Broadway Tower (United Kingdom), Swallow's Nest (Ukraine) and McCaig's Tower (United Kingdom). The list covers 10 follies in 4 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 5. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A folly is a building with no practical purpose beyond being looked at, and Europe, especially Britain and France, perfected the genre. In the eighteenth century landowners shaped their estates as picturesque scenes, and a sham ruin, a classical temple or an exotic pagoda gave the eye somewhere to rest. Later eccentrics built for memory, faith or obsession, and the most memorable follies are as much portraits of their makers as works of architecture.
Broadway Tower, a castellated Saxon-style tower designed by James Wyatt, crowns a high point of the Cotswolds. McCaig's Tower above Oban was modelled on the Colosseum by a local banker and left unfinished at his death. Mussenden Temple, a domed rotunda inspired by the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, stands at the very edge of a cliff above the Atlantic in Northern Ireland, built as a library by the Earl Bishop of Derry. The Dunmore Pineapple in central Scotland tops a garden pavilion with a giant stone pineapple, then a fruit of extraordinary luxury.
The French and Italian follies are stranger still. The Palais Idéal in Hauterives was built single-handedly by the postman Ferdinand Cheval from stones he collected on his rounds over thirty-three years. The Désert de Retz is a landscape garden scattered with fabriques, including a house built in the shape of a gigantic broken column, and the Pagoda of Chanteloup near Amboise rises in seven storeys over a former château park. Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, Sicily, is ringed with grotesque statues of monsters, and the Shell Grotto in Margate is an underground passage lined with millions of seashells whose origin remains unknown.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Broadway Tower | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 2 | Swallow's Nest | Castle | Ukraine | |
| 3 | McCaig's Tower | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 4 | Mussenden Temple | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 5 | Dunmore Pineapple | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Palais Idéal | Folly | France | |
| 7 | Villa Palagonia | Folly | Italy | |
| 8 | Shell Grotto | Folly | United Kingdom | |
| 9 | Désert de Retz | Folly | France | |
| 10 | 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 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. From 1822 to 1862 the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps ran a private printing press here, and later it was leased as a holiday retreat by Cormell Price, a friend of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Did you know? Morris's stays at the tower are said to have helped inspire him to found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877.
02 Swallow's Nest
Ластівчине гніздо
Ukraine · 8 km from Yalta44.431° N 34.129° E
Image by IrinaKushnikova from Pixabay In 1927 a major earthquake shook the Crimean coast hard enough to be felt as far as Yalta, and while the building itself came through largely intact, the cliff it stands on cracked badly.
Did you know? Its architect Leonid Sherwood was the son of Vladimir Sherwood, designer of the State Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow.
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. When McCaig died in 1902 only the outer wall was finished, and nothing more was ever added.
Did you know? The tower cost McCaig about £5,000 when building began in 1897.
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. Hervey dedicated it to Frideswide Mussenden, a young relative he admired and for whom he meant it as a retreat; gossip about the two circulated at the time, and she died in 1785, before the temple was finished. Around the drum runs a Latin line from Lucretius about the pleasure of watching, from safe ground, a ship labouring in a storm at sea - an inscription that reads rather differently when the waves are breaking directly below the wall.
Did you know? The Earl-Bishop wrote that building his Grecian temple on the cliff edge would also give employment to the poor of the district.
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. The ground floor opens to the south through a Palladian Serlian arch with Tuscan columns, and behind it lay hothouses warmed by a furnace that sent hot air through cavities in the walls, enough to grow exotic fruit in Scotland.
Did you know? Every window in the octagonal pavilion is curved, down to the individual panes of glass, following the circular walls inside.
06 Palais Idéal
France45.256° N 5.029° E
Image by Olzheim from Pixabay He worked on it for thirty-three years, mostly at night after his rounds, hauling stones home in a wheelbarrow with no training in architecture, masonry or sculpture — by his own reckoning, something like 10,000 days and 93,000 hours of solitary labour. " He finished it in 1912, at 75, and immediately asked to be buried inside it; French law on burial sites forced a refusal, so he spent his final years building himself an equally elaborate tomb nearby instead, completing it a year before his death in 1924.
Did you know? The land the palace stands on came to Cheval through the dowry of his second wife, Claire-Philomène Richaud.
07 Villa Palagonia
Italy · 15.3 km from Palermo38.080° N 13.511° E
Jpbazard Jean-Pierre Bazard · CC BY-SA 3.0 The villa was begun in 1715 for Ferdinando Francesco I Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, to designs by Tommaso Maria Napoli, a Dominican friar, assisted by Agatino Daidone; the main construction lasted until 1737. The plan joins two square blocks with a curved central section, and a double staircase with stone balustrades climbs to the main floor. It is one of the earliest examples of Sicilian Baroque villa architecture in the area around Palermo.
Did you know? Among the surviving statues are horses with human hands, men with horses' heads, dragons, hunchbacks, Moors and Pulcinella figures.
08 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. The patterns are made mostly of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops and oysters, set against a background of common periwinkles.
Did you know? The grotto was opened to paying visitors in 1837, within a couple of years of its rediscovery during work at Belle Vue cottage.
09 Désert de Retz
France · 13.4 km from Versailles48.893° N 2.016° E
Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0 The garden was the creation of François Racine de Monville, a wealthy aristocrat who bought the estate in 1774 and enlarged it over the following decade. In the fashion of the day it was an "Anglo-Chinese" landscape garden, a deliberately irregular park studded with fabriques, small buildings meant to evoke distant times and places. Some twenty were built: a Chinese House of wood (1777–78) where Monville first lived, an ice house in the form of a pyramid (1781), a Temple of Pan, a ruined Gothic church, an obelisk, an open-air theatre, a Tartar tent and a rocky entrance where, in the original guidebook, satyrs with torches greet arriving guests.
Did you know? Inside the column, four floors of rooms are arranged around a central spiral staircase lit from above by a skylight.
10 Pagoda of Chanteloup
Pagode de Chanteloup
France · 20.4 km from Tours47.391° N 0.970° E
Manfred Heyde , · CC BY-SA 3.0 Its builder was Étienne-François, Duke of Choiseul, Louis XV's chief minister, who had owned Chanteloup since 1761. In December 1770 he fell from favour and was ordered to retire there, but instead of an empty exile he found his house crowded with friends and admirers who defied the king to visit him. Shortly before his exile was lifted in 1775, he commissioned the architect Louis-Denis Le Camus to raise a monument to their loyalty. Work began on 2 September 1775 and was completed on 30 April 1778, and an inscription composed by the scholar Abbé Barthélemy, a regular guest, dedicates the tower to Choiseul's gratitude.
Did you know? Each of the seven forest avenues that converge on the pagoda was laid out to a length of three leagues.
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 remarkable follies in Europe?
- On our list, Broadway Tower (United Kingdom) ranks first, followed by Swallow's Nest (Ukraine) and McCaig's Tower (United Kingdom).
- Which country has the most follies in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from the United Kingdom (5), France (3) and Italy (1).
- What is a folly in architecture?
- A folly is a building constructed mainly for decoration or effect rather than use, often as an eye-catcher in a landscaped park. Typical forms include sham ruins, towers, temples and exotic pavilions.
- Who built the Palais Idéal?
- Ferdinand Cheval, a rural postman in Hauterives in south-eastern France. Starting in 1879, he spent 33 years building it by hand from stones gathered on his delivery rounds, and it was classified as a historic monument in 1969.
- Who made the Shell Grotto in Margate?
- No one knows. The grotto was discovered in 1835, and theories about its age range from an ancient temple to a Regency-era folly; its winding passages and chamber are decorated with an estimated 4.6 million shells.
- How many follies are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 10 follies in 4 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 5.