Roseberry’s Summerhouse: What Was It For? Nobody Quite Knows

A while has passed since I last posted a photo of Roseberry’s summerhouse.

I call it a summerhouse, though nobody agrees on what this odd building was for. The National Park have stuck a plaque on it calling it a shooting box. Fine, except a sketch by George Cruit puts the building there in 1788, and hunting with dogs came first, needing no box at all. The breech loading shotgun, and the sport it created, did not arrive until the late nineteenth century. A hundred years too late for this particular story.

Tell the locals that and you get a proper telling off. Generations have grown up on the shooting box tale, and nobody thanks you for taking it away.

More likely the building was a folly, or a prospect house, put there to make the view look better than it already was. Perhaps it was simply somewhere for the ladies to sit and wait while the gentlemen went off to conquer the summit, as gentlemen did.

Then came the Napoleonic war, and four soldiers were billeted there, watching for the beacon call that would warn of the French. That is when the fireplace and flue went in, which is why the roof is not symmetrical.