Fonthill Abbey

Fonthill Abbey—also known as Beckford's Folly—was a large Gothic revival country house built between 1796 and 1813 at Fonthill Gifford in Wiltshire, England, at the direction of William Thomas Beckford and architect James Wyatt. It was built near the site of the Palladian house, later known as Fonthill Splendens, which had been constructed by his father William Beckford. This, in turn, had replaced the Elizabethan house that Beckford the elder had purchased in 1744 and which had been destroyed by fire in 1755. The abbey's main tower collapsed several times, lastly in 1825 damaging the western wing. The entire abbey was later almost completely demolished.HistoryFonthill Abbey was the brainchild of William Thomas Beckford, son of wealthy English plantation owner William Beckford and a student of architect Sir William Chambers, as well as of James Wyatt, architect of the project.In 1771, when Beckford was ten years old, he inherited £1 million and an income which his contemporaries estimated at around £100,000 per annum, a colossal amount at the time, but which biographers have found to be closer to half of that sum. Newspapers of the period described him as "the richest commoner in England".