Before Instagram: Why Rich People Built Fake Ruins

SPEAKER_00 0:00 I've always wondered why there's a ruined archway in the middle of this woodland. What great building did it belong to? A castle, a church, a grand manor house? Well, it turns out it never belonged to anything at all. I'm Oli Giu and this is what we did before, the podcast where we chart the history of everyday life. I've walked under this canopy of trees in Leyland's Wordham Park in the northwest of England. On my way to see an ancient ice house adorned with some very unusual decorations. But first, likely built around the same time as the ice house, is this ruined archway? It looks truly ancient, but when it was erected in the 1840s, it probably looked a lot like it does right now. Ruined ancient, a piece of a greater hole. Which raises a really strange question. Why would somebody spend money building a fake ruin? You see, the Georgian and later Victorian upper classes became obsessed with what is called the picturesque movement. The idea was that landscapes should resemble paintings, not just be useful or orderly, but emotionally evocative. One of the easiest ways to achieve this was to add features that suggested age of history, mystery, and decay. And as you can see, on the right hand side of the archway on this larger column, there's an interesting stone carving just in the top. One article I read said it could be a gargoyle covering its face, but I'll let you decide what you think it might be. So, wealthy landowners would deliberately build things that look ruined. The man most associated with the transformation of this estate was James Noel Farrington, who inherited it in 1837 when he was just 24 years old. And he embarked on a major program of improvements to the entire Worden site. Perhaps this ruined archway was simply his way of making this woodland feel more romantic. Sham Castle in Bath is a very famous example of this. It's an 18th-century ornamental folly built to look like a castle, but it is just a decorative facade. A wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist at Ralph Allen just wanted to improve the view from his town residence. Imagine having the money to do that. I guess you could argue that Georgian landowners were doing sort of a 19th-century version of what people do on Instagram today. Curating views, creating picturesque backdrops, showing taste and status through aesthetics. Before they had AI to generate images of anything that they wanted, people had to reshape the landscape with time, effort, and a lot of money. This here is called a Folly Arch, and now you know what it is, you'll start spotting them everywhere. There are loads of country parks and estates in Britain with follies hiding in plain sight. Fridges were invented just about a hundred years ago, but humans have always needed to keep things cold, and they did that with these. This is an ice house, but this is unusual for a few reasons. You see, these stone-carved figures over here, well, they may be much older than the ice house itself. Local historians believe they were salvaged from the old nave of a nearby parish church. There's been a church at St Andrews in Leyland for over 800 years, one which dates back to the time of the Normans. And in 1816, the central part of St Andrew's Church was replaced. And these statues, well, they were probably parts of the church that would have otherwise got the toss during the construction work. And then you've got these ornaments as well on the top. I think one of these was the family crest for the Farrington family. And it wasn't enough, you know, to build a functional ice house, something most common people couldn't afford at the time. They also had to decorate it with their sort of picturesque ideals of beauty. And 200 years ago, this building would have been filled with mountains of ice, maybe sourced during cold spells from the park itself, maybe brought all the way from Norway on ships cut from frozen lakes. These days the door is locked, no one can enter. But at one point, maybe about six years ago, the door was unlocked, and I saw a Facebook post about some people who decided to enter it to see what was inside. They found it so creepy that they decided not to stick around for that long. And the reason is what we're looking at here is just the door, it's just the entrance to the ice house. To keep ice from melting, they had to dig a brick-lined chamber deep into the ground, effectively a giant insulated pit. So inside it's lightly dark, cold, winding, not lit at all. Definitely quite creepy. What's remarkable is how effective these ice houses could be. If properly packed during winter, ice could survive well into the summer, and in summer states it actually lasted all year. Food was probably not stored inside the ice house with the ice. Instead, you'd have servants coming and retrieving blocks of the ice and using them to keep the pantry areas cool and preserve perishable foods. According to local accounts, the ice stored here may have contained too many impurities for human consumption. So we, you know, humans couldn't eat it directly. Instead, it was just used as a way to keep food fresh for months on end, long before fridges were invented. But not everything here is pretending to be ancient. Not everything is a folly. There is something truly ancient in this park, and it's just round the back of the ice house on the mound behind it. You see, sitting on top of this dirt mound that covers the back of the ice house in order to keep the ice cool is something very, very old. This is a glacial erratic, a rock that was transported to Worden Park more than 20,000 years ago, and it wasn't brought here by any man. This rock drifted down during the last ice age all the way from the Lake District, which is 90 miles away, picked up by a roaming glacier that dropped it off on its journey. The Farringtons spent huge amounts of money creating an illusion of age and mystery in Werdon Park. Meanwhile, the oldest thing in the park was put here by a glacier and cost absolutely nothing at all. So during his time renovating and improving Wordon Hall, James Farrington created many features that still exist in the park today, but those are perhaps subjects for another episode. I'm Ollie, and this is What We Did Before, the podcast that charts the history of everyday life, and I'll see you next time.