Clone Henge

This is something a little different from my usual content, but I happen to love follys, and this is certainly one of Shropshires hidden gems. I actually knew about this place for years, due to growing up in the area, and my occasional rooftopping sidekick (before he shot his DNA into a woman and produced crotchfruit) Damien is quite fond of stone circles too, so he had also pointed out its existence to me during the early years of this blog. 

It was Tamsin of the Tunnel blog who said we should go check it out on our next adventure, so off we went. 

What's the story of this stone circle? Well, it's no secret that the folks of the 1800s liked their unusual garden features, and we've covered some bizarre ones in my blogs before. A stone circle is fairly simplistic by comparison. One day someone simply decided that they wanted a half-scale replica of Stone Henge on their estate, which I've nicknamed Clone Henge. However it does have an "official" title. Old Victorian maps refer to it as The Temple.

It's partially ruinous, but some speculate that this was an intentional part of its design, to make it look ancient.  

And while a stone circle doesn't seem particularly interesting, this actually has some surprising historic connections.

It's all fields and farmland now, but this was once the garden of a large estate called Quinta, which is a rather unusual name for something on the border of England and Wales. Quinta means "Fifth," deriving from the Latin "quintus."

Quinta is also used in Spain and Portugal to describe a country house, so some think that the Quinta Estate of Shropshire was named by someone who had traveled to the UK from Portugal.

Others speculate that it had something to do with the Roman presence on the border back in the day. There was apparently a Roman fort about a mile to the west that monitored multiple routes into Wales from England. "Quinta" is said to derive from a point where five roads met or something.

Clone Henge looks ancient, but on a closer look, you can see things like these rusty metal bolts that once held the stones together, indicative of a more recent creation. The stones aren't balanced above each other, but held in place.

While the exact date of its creation varies depending on what you read, it's generally said to be between 1840 and 1850. The mastermind behind its creation was a chap called Fred West. But not THAT Fred West. 

Hilariously, as a quick digression, there is a European urbex page that names its locations after serial killers and murderers, and some of those locations are notorious. Other explorers have gone there, researched it, and believed that this urbex page is providing the real name, which they in turn regurgitate on their own social media. It's even spread to the extent that legitimate media articles have shared the photos and falsely claimed that these places are the former homes, workplaces, or schools of the folks they've been nicknamed after, which is hilarious. I love it when the mainstream media gets bamboozled. It also threw me for a while! I was trying to add a gorgeous villa to my map, and I ended up spending the night trying to find out where some Victorian cannibal from Italy grew up. So it tickles me somewhat that I now have a location that I could easily, and legitimately, name after a serial killer.

Fred Wests Temple. It's a good thing I like wordplay or I'd be getting sued for plagiarism by those Europe explorers.

But this Fred West was not a serial killer. At least, if he was then nobody knows about it. He was born in 1767 and his brothers, William and John, were the third and fourth Earl de la Warr. Had John died without leaving an heir, I assume Fred would have become the fifth Earl, and we'd see some epic synchronicity when he ended up owning the Quinta. However, John reproduced.

The Earl de la Warr lineage is also quite fascinating, in that it can be traced back to the 1200s. By the late 1300s, the 4th Baron died without children, and his brother became the 5th Baron, and then he also died without children. The responsibility of the lineage fell to their sister, Joan, who married a guy called Thomas West and spawned young Reginald West, who became the Sixth Baron de la Warr.

Confusing me slightly, the first earl (Freds grandfather) was in fact the seventh Baron, a few centuries after Reginald West became the sixth, but I realised that this was because the Baron lineage recieved something of a reboot in the 1500s. Freds Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather William, the "first" Baron de la Warr was actually all set to be the 10th Baron, but he went and tried to poison his uncle (another) Thomas to get that inheritance early. It failed, and he was thrown in the tower in 1548 and disinherited. Uncle Thomas forgave him though, and was going to reinstate him as the heir, but then in 1554 he died, and all the legalese got in the way. I guess Williams plot to kill Uncle Thomas for that inheritance couldn't possibly have gone any worse. William then got involved with a chap called Henry Dudley and his notorious plot to de-throne Queen Mary. It failed, but it was such a huge plot that it actually took the monarchy three months to arrest and interrogate everyone involved. William West was convicted of treason, but he was pardoned in 1557 by Queen Mary, dodging the death sentence, and surviving into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who knighted him and rebooted his Baron title in 1570. While he was the "first" Baron de la Warr on paper, it seems that his lineage typically ignored this as time went on. His son Thomas, legally the second baron, would often refer to himself as the eleventh. The third/twelth Baron, also called Thomas because nobody had any fucking imagination, was historically significant because he was quite high ranking in the Virginia colony, one of the earliest English colonys in North America. The state of Delaware (and the river) is derived from De La Warr and everything.

Hows that for a bizarre Shropshire connection? The Great-Great-Great-Great grandson of the namesake of an entire US state came to Shropshire and built a minature stone henge for no reason.

But there might have been some political motivation that led to the creation of this stone circle. See, Fred West had other properties. The Quinta wasn't his primary residence... but then he got married. His wife, Maria Myddleton, was one of three sisters whose family had owned Chirk Castle. The sole male heir had died in 1796, and the three sisters had a bit of a legal battle over the estate. Maria was a bit pissed that she didn't get Chirk Castle, and who can blame her? It's a great castle. Maria married Fred in 1798, and then somehow all three Myddleton spouses, Fred and the husbands of Maria's sisters, ended up competing to becoming MPs in Denbigh.

The fact that these three were actively competing when all they had in common was their sister-in-laws seems a bit suspicious to me, and given that the ladies had competed bitterly for assets before, it wouldn't surprise me if they were pulling the strings. In preparation for his victory, Fred West put all his effort into the Quinta estate, planning on turning it into his permanent home so that he was closer to Denbigh. 

And what better way to make his new primary residence homely? Have a half-scale replica of stone henge built on the grounds, and name it The Temple, of course.

Each vertical stone has a series of smooth horizontal gashes, which I think are from the process of breaking larger stones up, but I don't know for sure, because I've never built a stone circle.

Alas, Fred West didn't become MP of Denbigh. He lost to his brother-in-law, Robert Myddleton-Bidulph, and all the effort put into the Quinta had been for nothing. After his death in 1852, his son, Fred West Again, sold the estate. Rumour has it that Fred West Again had debts and drinking problems, and the sale of the Quinta was because of that, but it's purely speculation. Interestingly, as a final nugget of random trivia, Fred West Agains grandson, George, was the second husband to Winston Churchills mother.

The Quinta was scooped up, including the stone henge, by a chap called Thomas Barnes. Thomas was an MP up in Bolton, and when it came to business he had his fingers in a lot of pies. Not only was he big in the cotton industry, but he was a chairman of a railway company, and owned a Welsh slate quarry too along with numerous coal mines and farms. He was also an absolute saint. After seeing children playing in the street, he donated eleven acres of his land to become a park, and in 1862 he purchased 200 acres of land in Jamaica to set up a cotton plantation, just to prove that it was possible to produce cotton without slave labour.

Upon his purchase of the Quinta in 1855, he had the original hall of Fred West demolished and had his own stately home built in its place. He kept the stone circle, as you can see. He also gave a lot to his local community which still exists today, establishing a chapel in 1862, where he'd also preach if no preacher was available, and also establishing the Quinta Congregational School in 1882.

I'm often pretty critical of religion, not so finding fault in the concept itself so much as loathing the "do as I do or you're going to Hell" attitude of some religious folks. They could learn a lot from Thomas Barnes, who clearly had a Christian faith and also actively used his wealth to improve the world around him. He died in 1897, and I think the Quinta may now be a Christian conference centre. The stone circle, however, sits in a field that had once been the park land of the Wests stately home.

I'm not sure what the stone circle would have been used for, if anything. Fred West had it built, and called it the temple, but did they sit here and enjoy the sun? Did they have parties here? Did they sacrifice virgins? Is it, like the real Stone Henge, secretly a means of parking a flying saucer so that the mechanic can get at the undercarriage when it needs repairs? Nothing is mentioned. It's just here.

Curiously there is a wooden post in the middle of the stone circle.

It looks like an electrical post that has been removed, so at some point someone decided to run power lines over the stone circle, and then later it was decided to remove them.

Look at these. Now I know what it's like to be a dentist in Rhyl. 

We noticed this unusual circle, and wondered if maybe the stones were at least partially decorated with shells as some point, as this was popular folly decor at the time. But it's not consistent enough to give that theory much weight.

Overall though, it's very peaceful here and has a pretty pleasant vibe. There was nothing much to do but at the same time I was reluctant to leave. But we had another place to visit, so off we went. 

I'll end on the grumpiest photo of Tamsin ever taken. It was raining.

That's it for the Fred West Stonehenge. It's a nice little gem hidden away in Shropshire, with some surprising historic connections. My next blog will be about this awesome little abandoned chapel, and then I'm doing one on an abandoned asylum, which is pretty exciting.

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Thanks for reading!