Last week’s Photo Challenge was quite bucolic. Bob Weingarten’s image showed the remains of a high stone wall, now covered with vines and bushes. A quiet road ran behind it. (Click here to see.)
It could have been many places in Westport. Many readers thought it might be found in a cemetery. Assumption on Greens Farms, and Willowbrook on Main Street came to mind.
Nope. It’s on Beachside Avenue, opposite #76.
That’s all I had. But — of course — “06880” readers knew more.
Both Susan Lloyd and Morley Boyd identified it as “Bedford’s Folly.” Mary Ann Batsell got the location too, though not the name. Apparently it was once part of the ginormous E.T. Bedford estate in Greens Farms.
But why the “folly”?
Susan Lloyd offers these fascinating facts: “A garden folly is a useless structure in a garden.”
She adds, “Bedford Gardens was open for walking on Sunday afternoons. There was also a fake canal with a small bridge.”
Sounds like a great place to play mini-golf!
And Morley Boyd notes, “The folly, in this case, served as an important garden design element intended to lend a sense of mystery and romance by imitating an old ruined structure. Trickery is an age old tool in large scale landscape garden design.”
So it’s not really ruined — it just looks that way.
Mary Ann Batsell says the gardens were once open to the public. In the 1980s, her father helped uncover them. (So maybe they were “ruined,” after all.)
Speaking of Sunday afternoon strolls, here’s this week’s Photo Challenge. Click “Comments” if you know where it was taken:
(Photo/Judith Bacal)
HINT: Like last week’s Photo Challenge, this too was not taken in a cemetery.