History
Clavell Tower was built in about 1830 by Reverend John Richards Clavell of Smedmore House as an observatory and folly. The Reverend John Richards had changed his name to John Richards Clavell after inheriting the estate in 1817.
The tower is about 35 feet (11 m) high and rises over what is known as Hen Cliff which rises about 330 feet (100 m) above the sea. The main tower is constructed of mortared selected stone and the windows are formed from brick. The ground floor is surrounded by Tuscan colonnade and the roof has a parapet built in stone. In total the tower has four floors; a stone ground floor, a wooden first, a wooden second and a wooden third floor. The tower is surmounted upon a shallow stone basement. Evidence suggests there were fireplaces within the ground floor which indicated the tower was intended to be occupied throughout the year. However, access to the first and second floors would have been accessible solely via a ladder.
Thomas Hardy, the novelist, often took his first love Eliza Nicholl to Clavell Tower. He used an illustration of it in his Wessex Poems. The local Coastguards used it as a lookout until the 1930s, when it was gutted by fire. The desolate condition of Clavell Tower was the inspiration behind Baroness P. D. James's prize winning 1975 novel The Black Tower. The tower was used by Anglia Television as a principal location in their six part adaptation of the story starring Roy Marsden in 1985, and featured in the music video for The Style Council's 1985 single Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Read more about this topic: Clavell Tower
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)