The `Saxon` tower was the brainchild of Capability Brown and designed by James Wyatt in 1794 in the form of a castle, and built for Lady Coventry in 1798ââ¬â1799. The tower was built on a beacon hill, where beacons were lit on special occasions. Lady Coventry wondered whether a beacon on this hill could be seen from her house in Worcester and sponsored the construction of the folly to find out. Indeed, the beacon could be seen clearly.
For some years, the tower became home to the printing press of Sir Thomas Phillipps. By the mid-1870s, it was being rented by C J Stone and Cormell Price[5], the latter being headmaster of the United Services College at Westward Ho!, and a close friend and confidant of artists William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: `I am up at Crom Price`s Tower among the winds and the clouds` Morris wrote in a letter to Aglaia Coronio in the summer of 1876.
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