Folly Fellowship

The Folly Fellowship is a not for profit organisation set up in 1988 as a pressure group to protect, preserve and promote awareness of Britain’s follies, grottoes and garden buildings. It organises trips throughout the year to follies and holds an annual garden party at a follied garden where the highlight is the cutting of a cake formed in the shape of one of the follies in the garden. Members also receive an annual Journal, three Magazines a year and a monthly e-Bulletin, each giving information about follies in different depths. Folly Fellowship members include architects, people who live in follies, people who build follies and other interested persons.

The Folly Fellowship has recorded around 1,800 follies and grottoes. It maintains a small library of books and papers, a slide collection, and a collection of measured surveys of many follies. The Folly Fellowship claims it is impossible to clearly define the line between architectural extravagance and "true folly". The group states that usually a builder does not intend to craft a folly, but that this is not always true. For example, Lord Berner commented of his folly at Faringdon (Oxford): "The great point of this tower, is that it will be entirely useless."

The Fellowship is regarded as an authority on follies. They are also the caretakers of some notable follies.

Famous quotes containing the words folly and/or fellowship:

    It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
    Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

    There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
    Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)