Sugar Loaf Folly, Brightling: The landmark built purely to help a man win a bet

There are many reasons to build a folly, and winning a bet is probably as good as any.

Sugar Loaf Folly near Woods Corner, Sussex.
Sugar Loaf Folly near Woods Corner, Sussex.
(Image credit: Alamy)
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Old stories are peppered with characters named ‘Mad Jack’ and the history of the Sugar Loaf Folly at Brightling is no different. One John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller is said to have built this strange, conical structure in the 1820s, to win a wager.

He had bet that he could see the spire of St Giles’s, Dallington, from his house and, realising his mistake, needed to create a false one in a hurry.

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Although only 15ft in diameter and containing two storeys connected by a ladder, a family lived here in the late 19th century and, during the Second World War, it was a machine-gun post.

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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