King Alfred's Tower

Listen for a moment. Up here on the ridge, the wind moves through the beech trees with a low, steady rush. Under your feet, the ground is soft with leaf litter and chalky mud. And then, through the trunks, a wall of deep red brick rises straight up, far taller than anything around it. It looks out of place in a quiet wood. That is exactly what its builder intended.

This is King Alfred's Tower. It stands on Kingsettle Hill, close to where Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset meet, at the edge of the Stourhead estate. It is a folly. In English landscape gardens, a folly is a building made mainly for effect, a structure to look at and to think about, rather than to live in or defend. This one is among the tallest of its kind in the country, rising to around fifty metres.

The man behind it was Henry Hoare the Second, a member of a wealthy London banking family. Through the middle of the eighteenth century, he shaped the valley below into the famous gardens of Stourhead, with a lake, temples and carefully planned views. The tower was one of his last great additions. Work on it began in the late 1760s and was finished in the early 1770s, to a design by the architect Henry Flitcroft, who also designed several of the garden's temples.

Why build such a thing in a wood? Hoare had several reasons, and they were patriotic ones. The tower marked the end of the Seven Years' War, a global conflict that left Britain with a much larger empire. It also celebrated the new king, George the Third, who had come to the throne in 1760. And above all, it honoured a much older king, Alfred the Great, who ruled the West Saxons in the ninth century.

This is where history and legend start to mix. Alfred's victory over a Viking army at the Battle of Edington, in 878, is well recorded. Before that battle, the chronicles say, he gathered his forces at a place called Egbert's Stone. Nobody knows for certain where that stone stood. But local tradition places it here, on this ridge. Hoare chose to believe the tradition, and he built his tower on the spot to make the point.

Now look at the shape of the building. Walk a little way around it and you will notice something unusual. The tower is not square and not round. It is triangular in plan. Each of its three corners swells into a rounded turret, so the whole structure looks a little like a tall, three-sided column. From some angles it seems thin and sharp. From others it looks broad and heavy. It changes as you move.

The material is red brick, laid in long, even courses. Up close, you can see small differences of colour from brick to brick, from orange to a dark plum red. Some faces of the tower are streaked by rain and touched with green lichen. In winter light the brick looks dark and almost purple. On a sunny summer evening, the same wall can glow a warm copper colour against the leaves.

On one face, above the doorway, look for the statue. A figure of King Alfred stands in a niche, set high into the brickwork. Below him, a stone panel carries an inscription. It describes Alfred raising his standard on this hill against the Danish invaders, and it praises him as a founder of English liberty. Read it slowly. It tells you less about the ninth century than about how eighteenth-century Englishmen liked to see their own past.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. The tower is almost hollow. Apart from the stairs, there are no floors and no rooms inside. One of the corner turrets holds a narrow spiral staircase of more than two hundred steps, winding up in the dark to a small viewing platform at the top. The rest of the inside is a tall, empty shaft open to the sky. It was built to be seen, and to be climbed, and nothing more.

The second surprise comes from the twentieth century. In the 1980s, a small aircraft flying in poor visibility struck the top of the tower. The crew on board were killed, and the upper part of the structure was badly damaged. The tower was later repaired and the top section was rebuilt. If you look carefully at the highest courses of brick, some people notice a slight difference in tone where the old work meets the new.

Today the tower is cared for by the National Trust, as part of the wider Stourhead estate. On the days when the staircase is open, people climb to the top for the view. On a clear day, the land opens out in every direction. You can look across the green fields and hedges of three counties, over Somerset levels to the west and the rolling chalk downs to the east. It is easy to see why someone might once have gathered an army on a hill like this.

Even if you stay on the ground, the setting is worth your time. The woods around the tower are full of small sounds. Pheasants call from the undergrowth. Dogs and walkers pass along the broad forest tracks. Many visitors arrive on foot, by the long woodland path from the Stourhead gardens, and the tower appears suddenly through the trees. That moment of surprise was part of the plan, too.

Think about the people who first came here in the 1770s. They would have walked or ridden up through these same woods. They would have read the same inscription and looked up at the same red walls. The meaning has shifted since then. Few visitors now think about the Seven Years' War. But the basic experience, standing small beneath something very tall in a very quiet place, has hardly changed.

Before you leave, step back to the edge of the clearing. Look up once more and follow one corner turret from the ground to the sky. Notice how the brick seems to narrow as it climbs, and how the trees frame it on every side. Listen to the wind in the beeches again. And as you walk away down the track, glance back over your shoulder. The tower will stay in view for longer than you expect.