Hawkstone Park is a 100 acre, Grade I listed landscape that was developed through the 1700s by Richard Hill. He developed the estate in response to his own travel in Europe and the wider fashion for follies to enhance country estates. By the early 1800s it was very well known and visitors travelled across the country to see it, but by 1894 the estate was bankrupt.
The estate was broken up and the follies forgotten until they were restored in 1993 and opened to the public as Hawkstone Park Follies Adventure.
The follies include various towers, castles, arches, caves and monuments as well as a grotto. Originally mines for copper and excavated from sandstone, they were developed into the grotto. When first opened they had stained glass windows allowing light into the interior that was encrusted with shells, fossils and furnace slag from nearby Coalbrookdale. Passages and tunnels were created to allow access to the area from several directions.
