MIRREN KESSLING

Sham Ruins, Into a Dwelling 

2025

In my twenties I walked a lot, criss-crossing England looking for something sacred, though I wouldn’t have used that word initially. I jumped fences to visit Boudicca’s tumulus, hid in a bush to watch a druid ceremony, slept in churches, and woke before dawn to climb a National Trust-owned hill and lead a handfasting ritual. I even crept into a tower where women weren’t allowed, just to see what was being kept from us (not much). 

Increasingly, I became interested in the spaces and gatherings that aim to deepen our relationship to the land, to one another, and to something beyond ourselves. Often the experiences that stayed with me weren’t transcendent or profound in the traditional sense. They were improvised and collective; ceremonies to mark life changes outdoors, seasonal rituals with friends, meditation walks through parks. They offered glimpses of belonging, but also exposed how little space contemporary life gives us to root, to gather, to stop.  

But I also noticed a tension. Many of these spaces I moved through were closed, overly curated, hard to access. Some echoed organised religion while others came with high costs or a language too certain. I didn’t want another system. I wanted to get lost.

This winter I went on a residency in Finland. The forest there was unfamiliar in its wildness. I roamed freely over its vast and wide terrain, working my way through the knee-deep snow patterned by the frozen tracks of animals and humans. By comparison, the English landscape I pictured in my mind felt tamed: clipped lawns, trimmed hedges, artificial hills, potholed paths, tree lines, fences, and strange structures half-hidden in copses.

What I remembered was more landscaping than landscape. 

I had brought with me a second-hand copy of Monumental Follies: An Exposition on the Eccentric Edifices of Britain, published in 1972. I became fixated on these follies: ornamental towers, druidic temples, sham ruins, well houses and theatrical monuments built by landowners of the past. Over time these follies have fused with the land, their presence mistaken for something ancient. But these are not ruins of the past, they are residues of a narrative. 

The persistent image of the lone tower caught my attention. Often seen as a site of solitude and perspective shift, in storytelling the high tower is frequently visited in the climax of a story: the final threshold, the location of great revelation. But if that’s the case, then why where were so many of these follies built without staircases or doors for entry? Did any truth lie within? What was waiting behind the walls? 

These towers weren’t meant to be entered. They were built to be seen from below; to impose; to stage control, authority and dominion. They implied the sacred while holding it at a tantalising, unreachable distance. If the land is read through the tower, it tells a particular story of inheritance held tightly, of access denied. 

I began grappling with what it means to seek meaning, connection, or transcendence in a landscape already shaped by fantasy and exclusion. What kind of spiritual inheritance is offered in a place where access to land, and by extension identity, is so often mediated through nostalgia and ownership?

The image of the folly twitched. An arm appeared, reaching through a growing tear in a paper window at the top of the tower. Figures from paintings, architectural fragments and phrases from that strange book started finding their way towards each other. In a silent trance, I watched as the images from other old books began undoing themselves. Unravelling to expose their inner seams and scaffolding, crawling inside and out of one another, knocking each other down and re-forming. The sham ruin birthing itself. Again and again and again.

The landscape I remembered now felt more like a stage set, its sacred history a construction, imagined and reimagined through centuries of longing and loss. These towers struck me as fantasies authored by power and posing as tradition, surrounded by land long enclosed. No wonder so many were named sham ruins. They are symbols of a selective memory, the pretence of romanticism from an untouchable overseer. 

Probing the edifice of these ruins; gazing at their structures, I let my mind slip like smoke into an uneasy dwelling, somewhere between enchantment and delusion. This was not

revelation from on high, but meaning made in the cracks, the trespasses, the reaching, the refusal to stay outside. It was a different kind of threshold, marking the moment of stepping off the path and slipping under the fence. Belonging does not require invitation. We take root where we wish. 

Now tendrils push out of my toes: slow, stubborn things threading down through the floor below, down the sides of the walls, teasing through the mortar between bricks, slipping past foundations into the mouldering layers below. I wait to see what stirs, and what, in time, might rise.