Blaise Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Perched on the summit of a wooded hill in Henbury, north-west of Bristol, Blaise Castle has never defended anything: it is a sham fortress, a Gothic folly conceived in 1766 to enliven the landscape of a pleasure estate. Its compact silhouette — a round tower flanked by three turrets crowned with battlements — rises above the trees and serves both as an eye-catcher and as a belvedere. Its patron, the Bristol merchant Thomas Farr, wanted to be able to watch the ships on the Severn estuary from it and to entertain his guests in a romantic setting. Unusually for a garden building of this period, the tower was designed to be lived in. The hill also bears the remains of an Iron Age hillfort, whose banks and ditches are still discernible. After Farr's bankruptcy, the estate passed to the Harfords, who had a house built there and called in Humphry Repton and then John Nash. Owned by the city since 1926, the whole now forms a vast public park; the tower, stripped of its interior fittings during its repair in 1957, remains the emblem of the estate.