The Beckford’s tower was designed to provide those approaching with gothic glimpses through the trees, spun in shade and dappled light, though the structure itself is considered Neo-classical.
If you were to go for a stroll just along the outskirts of Bath, pulling branches from your face as you plod through the brush, fragments of what appears to be a tower would glint back at you. The Beckford’s tower was designed that way—in puzzle pieces— to provide those approaching with gothic glimpses through the trees, spun in shade and dappled light, though the structure itself is considered Neo-classical. An “Architectural Folly,” some call it.
It is the massive cemetery of a thousand dead that rolls before you when you erupt from the forest—perhaps tripping on a stray root and landing before a grave— which lends Beckford’s tower a gothic touch. It could very well be the backdrop of a Brontë novel, where a lone tower, haunting in its dominion, rises from a field of dead and spies over the land.
The tower was where William Beckford, a novelist, patron, collector, and Sanskrit scholar, retreated from the London Season. He pierced famous paintings into the inner walls, stubborn leftovers from a prior life of fabulous wealth. He built an observatory at the tower’s top that could spy out as far as Stourhead, maybe farther, and to mount himself there, he climbed hundreds and hundreds of stairs that fashioned the tower’s interior, reverberating in pink, into the inside of a conch shell. You could see anything, be anything, up there.
Outside, a fence rides along the cemetery’s rim, barring the dead from spilling out into a farm of grazing sheep and lazing dogs. Hanging my body limply over the gate, I imagined tumbling down onto the pile of fluffy cloud-like sheep below. At my feet, there were many old stones, half-covered in frothy moss. I took a stick and knelt into the soil, scratching the moss from the rocks. With some effort, I turned one over. Twenty-something pillbugs and centipedes scattered out, some running to under the next rock, some burying into the coffins below. I hurled the moist rock over the fence, and it tumbled and tumbled for miles until it was just a speck.
I was a child again.
