Hope Folly

Hope Folly was a building out of step with time.  Built sometime towards the end of the nineteenth century, it looked like something from a more modern age.  We do not know exactly when or who built it but it became synonymous with Mr Edwin Hope and the various failed enterprises that he undertook and hence became known as Hope's Folly.  The building was never actually called Hope Folly but over the years it has assumed this name.

Mr Hope, like his building, was a man before his time.  His apparent hair brained schemes to lay on gas and water supplies to rural Meldreth, Melbourn and Shepreth were a brave enterprise for the early twentieth century and showed him to be a man of vision.  It was some four decades later before water was laid to the villages and considerably longer before the gas arrived.