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Unusual buildings

 

 

Landmark has a large number of unusual historic buildings available for self-catering holidays. From follies to forts, ruins to railway stations we have unique properties throughout Britain, four in Italy and three in France.

 

Click on a picture to find out more about the building featured, or hover over for a short description.

 

Alton Station is the only Italianate railway station in Staffordshire. The trains which once brought excursions from the Potteries are long gone but the atmosphere of an earlier age remains. Living in the former station master's house and waiting room, it is easy to imagine a great steam engine pulling into the station.

 

The Pigsty in North Yorkshire was once really a sty. Squire Barry of Fyling Hall is said to have been inspired by the classical architecture he had seen in the Mediterranean during his travels in the 1880s when building this home for his pigs. With a view over hills towards Robin Hood's Bay from under the Classical pediment this sty, we feel, is fit for a higher breed of inhabitant.

 

Robin's Hood Hut is one of several follies built in the grounds of Halswell House in the 1740s. Approaching Robin Hood's Hut through the dark wood, you come upon an apparently rustic cottage, with thatched roof and bark-clad door. Once inside, the elegant interior provides a fitting antechamber to the umbrello, from where the view stretches across the Mendip Hills towards the Bristol Channel and the mountains of South Wales beyond.

 

Gothic Temple is a splendid, historic folly built in the gardens at Stowe in 1741. Inside the rooms are all circular with the main vault of the central space painted with heraldry. To be on the first floor gallery is an important architectural experience.

Freston Tower is a six-storey Tudor folly that looks out over the River Orwell, just south of Ipswich. Built in about 1550, of red brick with a distinctive blue brick diapering pattern, it has is a single room on each floor, with the sitting room at the top to take advantage of the unrivalled views.

 

The Egyptian House, Penzance is a rare and noble survivor of a style that enjoyed a vogue after Napoleon's campaign in Egypt of 1798. It was built in 1835 as a museum and geological repository and now is let as three flats.

 

Deep in the Surrey countryside stands a cluster of buildings which were commissioned in 1843 from A. W. Pugin. With ample funds, Pugin produced a group of buildings generally agreed to be among his finest work, using good local materials in a Picturesque style that adapted that of the Middle Ages for his own time. Among these was this gatehouse, built to guard the entrance to the Peper Harow estate.

Appleton Water Tower in Norfolk is an octagonal Victorian water tower of exceptional quality, designed in 1877 by Robert Rawlinson for Queen Victoria on the Sandringham Estate. The accommodation is set over four floors with a different room on each. From the roof terrace there are fine views over miles of wide, open landscape. Here, on this exposed hilltop, you can even see the distant gleam of the Wash.

 

The Château was built in 1747 as a weekend retreat by a wealthy lawyer. Designed by architect John Platt when he was just 19, it is an ornamental garden building with a French flavour and stands in parkland with fine views towards the River Trent.

 

The grand entrance is all that survives of the House of Correction 'prison' once intended for minor offenders - the idle and the disorderly. It is a bold and noble piece of architecture designed by Lincolnshire architect Bryan Browning in a beautiful and interesting part of the world.

 

The Ruin in North Yorkshire is dramatically perched above a steep wooded gorge, in the remnants of an outstanding eighteenth-century garden at Hackfall, conceived and created by the Aislabies. A richly decorated sitting-room is flanked by a bedroom and bathroom; flitting between the two wings across a moonlit terrace is a truly Gothic experience.

 

 
 
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