The Folly of Hope

Alan Terrill runs the website of the Folly Fellowship. He and his wife Claire live in the Hope Valley, near to Minsterley, Shropshire, where their garden is itself home to a couple of follies, plus various welded metal animals. One of the follies is a shed in the guise of a tin tabernacle, its front influenced by the spa building in Tenbury Wells.

The tortoise tunnel was built, in rendered blockwork, into the side of the steep garden. At one end is a round room, about six feet across, the roof of which was formed using the top of an old circular gazebo. The sides of this were used as a former for the tunnel roof, a painted Gothic arch about six feet above ground level.

The façade of the tunnel was built up with sandbags, over which is mortared stone from the nearby stream. Sedum matting was pinned over the top. The tunnel has a solid floor, that part in the round room sporting a mosaic in the pattern of a tortoise shell. The exterior of the room's roof is a three-dimensional mosaic in the shape of a tortoise, the head and legs of which were fabricated from wood covered with lead sheet.

Alan plans to build, in wood, a tower at the currently open end of the tunnel, likely about twenty feet tall, and in the shape of the grain elevators of Saskatchewan. This will look great against the background of the wood-clad house, almost Alpine in its lime green woodstain.