History
Mackworth-Dolben built the tower to commemorate the death of his eldest son, William Digby, who drowned at sea on 1 September 1863. Digby, a naval officer serving on the Volta drowned in the mouth of the River Niger. His younger brother, the poet Digby Mackworth Dolben drowned in 1867.
The tower was circular and about 100 feet high. A gabled extension of one of the two floors had been added in keeping. The tower stood far back with a long driveway in front, along Station Road in Finedon. Not much changed in the surroundings of the Volta Tower apart from Finedon's new cemetery was built alongside the Volta Tower in 1892.
Read more about this topic: Volta Tower
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)