Fonthill Abbey

In 1771, when Beckford was ten years old, he inherited £1 million (equivalent to £115,100,000 in 2023)[4] 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.

Beckford chose exile in the company of his wife, Lady Margaret Gordon, whom he grew to love deeply; however, she died in childbirth after the couple had found refuge in Switzerland.

Beckford travelled extensively after this tragedy—to France (repeatedly), to Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (the country he favoured above all).

Fonthill Abbey would be vast, reflecting "the aesthetic category of 'the Sublime' as defined by the philosopher Edmund Burke in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Indeed, his biographers and his correspondence indicate that, during Wyatt's prolonged absences, he took it upon himself to direct the construction of the Abbey, as well as leading the landscaping efforts on his estate.

By combining different architectural styles and elements, Wyatt achieved a faux effect of layered historical development in the building.

Glass painter Francis Eginton did much work in the building, including thirty-two figures of kings, knights, etc., and many windows, for which Beckford paid him £12,000.

To speed the work, he out-bid (some would say bribed) 450 more from the building of the new royal apartments at Windsor Castle by increasing an ale ration.

The approach to the abbey, some 900 metres long and named the Great Western Avenue, ran in a straight line through woodland ENE from the Hindon-Tisbury road.

He disagreed with Beckford's taste, remarking[13] It is, in a word, a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy-shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly, and, at the same time, most worthless, in the productions of art and nature.Beckford's obsessive haste in erecting the grandiose building, coupled with his wish to achieve heights in the tower which were structurally unsound, and the use of a building method called "compo-cement" by Wyatt, which consisted of timber stuccoed with cement, led to the eventual collapse of the tower—damaging the western wing of the building too—in 1825.

Only a small two-storey remnant of the north wing, with a four-storey tower, still stands; this fragment was designated as Grade II* listed in 1966.

Two groups of four statues, representing the four seasons and the four elements, stand among trees southeast of the site; they are thought to have been bought by the Marquess at the Paris Exhibition of 1855 or 1867.