Hawkstone Park
Hawkstone Park Follies, near to Market Drayton, in Shropshire, England. It is 100-acres of beautiful and enormous follies and landscaped grounds, based around the authentic Norman Red Castle, the follies were built by Sir Rowland Hill (d. 1783) & his nephew Sir Richard Hill in the 18th century, then restored from 1990 and re-opened from 1993. It is now Grade-1 listed. It takes a 2.5 hour walking tour to complely see the Follies and their landscape.
It was used to represent Narnia in the BBC's TV adaptation of C. S. Lewis's books.
Dr. Johnson visited and wrote of...
- "its prospects, the awfulness of its shades, the horrors of its precipices, the verdure of its hollows and the loftiness of its rocks ... above is inaccessible altitude, below is horrible profundity." (1774).
Erasmus Darwin also visited, and notes the outcrops of copper-bearing rocks...
- "at Hawkstone in Shropshire, the seat of Sir Richard Hill, there is an elevated rock of siliceous sand which is coloured green with copper in many places high in the air." (1783).
Hawkstone is currently combined with an adjacent hotel, golf course, and moto cross track.