The Most Remarkable Follies in the United Kingdom
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable follies in the United Kingdom are Broadway Tower, McCaig's Tower and Mussenden Temple. The list covers 5 follies. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Britain is the home of the folly. In the 18th and 19th centuries landowners, often rich and sometimes eccentric, scattered their parks with towers, temples and grottoes that served no purpose except to be seen, to frame a view or to show off. Many stand on hilltops and cliffs chosen for the outlook, so that the building and the landscape work as one.
Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds, a Saxon-style castle tower designed by James Wyatt in the 1790s, rises on a ridge with views across several counties. McCaig's Tower above Oban is a granite ring of arches modelled on the Colosseum, left unfinished at its builder's death. Mussenden Temple stands on the cliff edge above the Atlantic at Downhill, a domed rotunda built in 1785 for the Earl Bishop as a library. The Dunmore Pineapple in Stirlingshire crowns a garden pavilion with a carved stone pineapple some 14 metres high. The Shell Grotto in Margate, found by chance in 1835, is an underground passage lined with millions of shells whose origin is still unknown.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Broadway Tower | Folly | |
| 2 | McCaig's Tower | Folly | |
| 3 | Mussenden Temple | Folly | |
| 4 | Dunmore Pineapple | Folly | |
| 5 | Shell Grotto | Folly |
01 Broadway Tower
United Kingdom52.024° N 1.836° W
The author is Newton2 (cropped by Yummifruitbat ) · CC BY 2.5 Around the tower lies a country park, and the hillside holds two reminders of the twentieth century: a memorial to the crew of an RAF Whitley bomber that crashed here on a training flight in June 1943, and an underground Royal Observer Corps monitoring post of the Cold War, built in the late 1950s, decommissioned in 1991 and restored for visitors. The upper floors of the tower are used as a museum.
Did you know? Another story holds that the tower signalled to the staff at Croome Court that the Earl and Countess were on their way home.
02 McCaig's Tower
United Kingdom56.416° N 5.469° W
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 The unfinished shell turned out better than any museum. Inside is a quiet public garden, and from the arches the view opens over Oban Bay to the islands of Kerrera, Lismore and Mull. The tower is a Category B listed building. Come near sunset, when the low light turns the granite warm and the ferries to the isles slip out below.
Did you know? Surviving building drawings show the plan grew as work went on: a design dated 1895, an addition in 1896 and a further 15 feet of wall height in 1897.
03 Mussenden Temple
United Kingdom · 38.2 km from Londonderry/Derry55.168° N 6.811° W
D LN · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple belonged to the Earl-Bishop's Downhill estate, and the walk to it passes the roofless shell of Downhill House, his great mansion, gutted by fire in 1851 and left open to the sky after its roof came off in 1950. The cliff has been creeping towards the temple for two centuries: carriages once drove all the way round it, and in 1997 the National Trust, which owns the demesne, had the rock face stabilised to keep the building from going over. From the rotunda the view runs west along the long sands of Downhill Strand to Magilligan Point and across Lough Foyle to Inishowen in Donegal, and east past Castlerock towards Portstewart, Portrush and, on a clear day, Fair Head.
Did you know? Downhill House and the temple together cost an estimated £80,000.
04 Dunmore Pineapple
United Kingdom56.077° N 3.787° W
giannandrea · CC0 In 1974 the building passed to the National Trust for Scotland, and the Landmark Trust restored it and now lets the pavilion and the two bothies either side as holiday accommodation. The walled garden, on a south-facing slope, has been replanted with an orchard and water features, and woodland paths surround it. The building itself cannot be entered by day visitors, but it can be admired from the garden, which is open to all.
Did you know? The windows and door of the pavilion are topped with Gothic ogee arches, an odd note on an otherwise classical building.
05 Shell Grotto
United Kingdom · 29 km from Dover51.388° N 1.390° E
Gernot Keller www.gernot-keller.com · CC BY-SA 2.5 Margate, on the north coast of Kent, became one of England's first seaside resorts in the 18th century, when Londoners came by boat down the Thames to bathe; the grotto sits in the old town a short walk from the sands.
Did you know? For decades gas lamps lit the grotto and blackened the shells; cleaning trials show that most of them are actually white.
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 the United Kingdom?
- On our list, Broadway Tower ranks first, followed by McCaig's Tower and Mussenden Temple.
- What is a folly in architecture?
- A folly is a building constructed mainly for decoration, often imitating a ruin, temple or tower, and placed in a landscaped park to create a view or a sense of surprise.
- Why is there a giant pineapple at Dunmore?
- Pineapples were a rare luxury and a symbol of wealth in 18th-century Britain. The Earl of Dunmore had the stone pineapple built over a garden pavilion near the hothouses where such fruit were grown.
- Who built the Shell Grotto in Margate?
- No one knows. It was discovered in 1835, and theories about its age range from an ancient temple to an 18th-century folly.
- How many follies are on this list in the United Kingdom?
- The list covers 5 follies.