Folly

A folly is a building put up mainly for decoration, one that suggests some other purpose through its appearance or is extravagant enough to go beyond an ordinary garden building. Follies flourished on European estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners built them purely for visual pleasure, often in the form of a mock Roman temple, a Gothic ruin, an Egyptian pyramid, a Chinese pagoda or a medieval castle meant to evoke another era or a distant place. What counts as a folly is famously in the eye of the beholder, since it must be a real building rather than a mere ornament, even though it serves no practical function. During famines such as the Great Famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849, some follies served the added purpose of relief work, giving starving laborers paid employment building structures such as roads leading nowhere and piers set in bogs.