Broadway Tower

Feel the wind first. Up here on the ridge it rarely stops. It pushes through the grass, tugs at your coat, and carries the smell of sheep and cut hay up from the fields below. Then look up at the tower itself. Its pale limestone walls rise against the sky, crowned with battlements, little balconies, and three rounded turrets. It looks like a castle from a storybook. But no army ever marched here. This castle was built as a view, not a fortress.

You are standing on Beacon Hill, above the village of Broadway, on the western edge of the Cotswolds. This ridge is the second-highest point in the whole Cotswold range. The ground falls away steeply to the west, toward the wide Vale of Evesham. On a clear day the land below looks like a patchwork quilt. Small fields, hedgerows, orchards, and church towers stretch out toward hills that turn blue in the distance.

So why would anyone build a castle on an empty hilltop? The answer belongs to the late eighteenth century, and to a fashion called the folly. A folly is a building made mainly for decoration or delight, with little practical use. Wealthy landowners of that time loved them. They built mock ruins, fake temples, and towers to give their landscapes a romantic, dramatic point to look at. Broadway Tower is one of the finest examples in England.

The tower was designed by the architect James Wyatt and finished at the end of the 1790s. It was built for George William Coventry, the sixth Earl of Coventry, whose family seat was at Croome Court, many miles to the west. The idea is often linked to the famous landscape gardener Lancelot Brown, known as Capability Brown, who had worked for the Earl. Brown understood how a single tower on a far horizon could change the feeling of a whole view.

There is a popular story about how this hill was chosen. According to the tale, Lady Coventry wondered whether a beacon fire lit on this ridge could be seen from her home at Croome. A fire was lit, and the answer was yes. So the Earl built his tower here, on the spot that his wife could see. It is a lovely story. Treat it as local legend rather than firm record, but it explains the place well.

Now look closely at the shape. The plan is a hexagon, with three round turrets attached to alternate sides. Wyatt designed it in a Saxon style, imitating the medieval castles that people of that time imagined their ancestors had built. Walk slowly around the base. You will see that the tower looks different from every angle. From one side it seems slim and tall. From another it appears broad and heavy. That shifting outline was part of the design.

Here is something many visitors never think about. After the Coventry family, the tower passed into the hands of Sir Thomas Phillipps, a passionate collector of books and manuscripts. Phillipps lived nearby and was obsessed with old documents. He used this windy tower to run a small private printing press. Imagine the scene. Ink, paper, and heavy machinery carried up a hill, all so that a collector could print copies of rare texts far from the noise of the world.

In the nineteenth century the tower drew another kind of visitor. William Morris, the designer, poet, and early champion of craftsmanship, spent holidays here in the 1870s. His friends, the painters Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, came too. They loved the rough, simple life on the hill, despite the draughts and the lack of comfort. Rooms inside now tell the story of Morris and his circle, so look out for their names as you climb.

Morris's time here connects to an important idea. In 1877 he helped found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. That society argued that old buildings should be repaired with care, not rebuilt or made to look new. It was a quiet revolution in how Britain treats its past. Standing here, in a building that was itself a fantasy of the past, you can see how these thoughts might have formed in his mind.

The hilltop also carries harder memories from the twentieth century. During the Second World War, a bomber on a training flight crashed near the tower, and its crew were killed. A small memorial stone remembers them. Later, during the Cold War, a small underground monitoring post was built close by. It was designed so that observers could report on nuclear explosions and radioactive fallout if war ever came. That grim, practical bunker sits only a short walk from a romantic folly. The contrast is striking.

Now let your eyes travel outward again. People often say that, on the very clearest days, you can see across many counties from the top of the tower. The exact number depends on who you ask, and on the weather. What is certain is the scale of it. To the west the land runs toward the Malvern Hills. Closer in, the honey-coloured stone of Broadway village sits below the slope, its houses built from the same Cotswold limestone as this tower.

Keep watching the fields around you. The land near the tower is used as a deer park, and red deer often graze in the grass. They are calm but wild animals, so enjoy them from a distance. You may also notice walkers with backpacks and maps. The Cotswold Way, a long-distance footpath that runs along the edge of these hills, passes close by. Many people arrive here on foot, after a steep climb up from the village below.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and listen. The wind moves across the ridge. Sheep call from somewhere down the slope. Perhaps a skylark sings high above the grass. Look once more at the turrets, the narrow windows, the weathered battlements. More than two centuries ago, someone built this tower simply so that people could look at it, and look out from it. And here you are, doing exactly that. As you walk away, turn back once. The tower will still be there, on the horizon.