Lord Cobham's Monument – Fane of Pastoral Poetry loop from Maids Moreton

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Lord Cobham's Monument – Fane of Pastoral Poetry loop from Maids Moreton

Moderate

hikers

Lord Cobham's Monument – Fane of Pastoral Poetry loop from Maids Moreton

02:36

9.97km

70m

Hiking

Moderate hike. Good fitness required. Easily walkable paths.

Last updated: August 18, 2026

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Temporary access restrictions

Includes segments with temporary access restrictions.

After 4.26 km for 926 m

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3.70 km

Woodland Walk at Stowe Landscape Gardens

Highlight • Trail

Woodland walk along the edge of the magnificent Stowe Landscape Gardens. If you have time, you may want to divert into the gardens and explore the many structures and statues here.

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4.55 km

Lord Cobham's Monument

Highlight • Monument

As John Martin Robinson suggests, this monument may look to modern eyes more like a lighthouse than a classical column. This appearance derives to a great extent from its octagonal, as opposed to cylindrical, shape and the exaggerated flutes in each of the eight faces. It is essentially a Doric column, however, though hollow with a spiral staircase leading to a platform in the belvedere at the top. It was completed by 1749, the year of Lord Cobham's death.
In fact, it was designed not only as a memorial to Lord Cobham, commissioned by his wife, but as a viewing tower from which one could see the entire garden (and, as Bevington remarks, parts of five counties). An eyecatcher in its own right, standing 115 feet tall, it can be seen not only from the Temple of Concord and Victory in the Grecian Valley but also from the Temple of Friendship at the southern end of Hawkwell Field. The Survey remarks that the monument "is similar to, and may have been inspired by, the column erected slightly earlier by the Duchess of Marlborough to her husband at Blenheim."

During extensive renovation in 2000-2001, the statue of Lord Cobham was returned to its original place atop the belvedere (it had been destroyed in 1957 when lightning struck it), and the entire structure was limewashed to give it an even pale yellow color and to protect the stone from the elements. The base of the Monument is decorated with stone lions on the four buttresses and with plaques displaying quotations from two of Alexander Pope's Moral Epistles -- one dedicated to Lord Cobham on the characters of men and the other dedicated to the Earl of Burlington on the proper use of riches. The two inscriptions read as follows:
And you, brave Cobham, to the latest breath,
Shall feel your ruling passion strong in death;
Such in those moments, as in all the past,
Oh, Save my Country, Heaven! shall be your last.
Consult the genius of the place in all;
That bids the waters rise, or gently fall;
That helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches op'ning glades,
Unites the woods, and varies shades from shades;
Nature shall join you; Time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at,---perhaps a Stowe.
faculty.bsc.edu/jtatter/cobham.html

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5.01 km

Fane of Pastoral Poetry

Highlight • Monument

I love his hidden treat, great spot for a picnic of the westher turns with four benches inside to take a pew.

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5.08 km

Samson and the Philistine Statue, Grecian Valley, Stowe

Highlight • Monument

And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith’.

-Book of Judges 15:15

Today the statue originally known as Samson and the Philistine is restored to the Grecian Valley, a landscape that was once enriched with acquaintances from the mythical antiquity of Hercules and the pastoral dream of the late eighteenth century. The tranquil pasture land, a testament to ‘Capability’ Brown who designed this, the first man-made valley in Britain, conceived its own world, and was based on its own ethos of creation: everything is possible.

Lord Cobham, the owner of the estate at the time, interpreted this through a group of statues depicting the twelve labours of Hercules, to represent the notion of victory through physical combat, martial strength and patriotism. This iconography was a fashionable statement of support for the Glorious Revolution and Whig ideology.

Now, the Grecian Valley is a place where Samson and the Philistine can be Hercules and Cacus, the former slaying the fire breathing giant; or indeed Cain and Abel, if the ass’s jaw is mistaken for a rib. Over time the statue has been named after all three, a journey now manifested in its single, still and silent form. All of these myths are reborn at Stowe today, proof that anything really is possible.

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7.46 km