Wadesmill Hertfordshire hotels:

The grotto was built, or at least built for, John Scott, an 18th century poet. He was born in London in 1731 and moved to Hertfordshire in 1740 to find cleaner air. John Scott inherited Amwell House and its grounds when his father died in 1768. Building grottoes was fashionable at this time so when rebuilding the house and landscaping the gardens he decided to build his own. Scott's Grotto is a series of interconnected chambers, extending some 67ft into the chalk hillside. It is rumoured to have cost £10,000 and is thought to have taken 30 years to complete. The chambers and tunnels are lined with shells, flints and pieces of coloured glass, some donated by friends. On top of the hill above the tunnels there is a summer house which would have commanded a wonderful view over the town of Ware. The picture on the left shows the inside of the Council Chamber as labelled on Mr R T Andrews's 1900 Plan of the Grotto. This chamber is the most highly decorated and has seats inset into it's wall. One of these seats even has the word FROG written in shells, referring to his wife, Sarah Frogley. Several theories exist as to why he built it, was it that he just wanted to decorate his garden or perhaps he wanted somewhere to write? Another possibility is he needed an attraction to draw London society out to visit him in Ware. Scott kept a visitor's book which contains three thousand names so the attraction obviously worked.