Cavendish memorial fountain
English fountain
The Cavendish memorial fountain is a drinking fountain erected in 1886 at Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire, England as a memorial to Lord Frederick Cavendish following his murder in Phoenix Park by the Irish National Invincibles in May 1882. The fountain is a Grade II listed building.
Background
Following the murder of Lord Frederick there were a number of memorials proposed to him; the proposal for a pillar or obelisk at Bolton Abbey was first made in September 1882 by electors of the Northern West Riding of Yorkshire parliamentary constituency (for whom Cavendish had been an MP since 1865). The proposal was led by William Foster, owner of the Black Dyke Mills, but he died before the proposal came to fruition. A committee, chaired by Angus Holden was formed to take the idea forward and £2,000 (equivalent to £210,254 in 2025) was raised in donations.
Bids for a memorial were sought and the chosen bid was one designed by Manchester architects Thomas Worthington and John Garrard Elgood. The design was for a tall crenellated tower to be sited on South Nab, a promontory overlooking the River Wharfe (54°0′2″N 1°52′29″W, grid reference SE 083 560). In 1884, the Duke of Devonshire (Lord Frederick's father) notified the committee that objections to the planned tower had been received and that it "would be detrimental to the landscape of the district and mar the beauty of the outline". On the basis of this and also the Duke's own opinion about the unsuitability of the design and location, the committee resolved to find another solution.
Worthington and Elgood came up with a different design, this time for a fountain.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cavendish memorial fountain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.