John Gaskell built White Nancy to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and it once had an entrance with stone seats inside, although this was sealed up some time ago.
It temporarily bears a '50' sign at the moment to commemorate the fact that fifty years ago (in 1964) the first Bollington Festival was held.
Stones have been laid around the folly, with four of them carrying the first letter of the points of the compass.
White Nancy overlooks the village of Bollington in Cheshire. I'm uncertain about the other stones here, but think they must be the remains of a beacon that pre-dates White Nancy.
On posts around White Nancy are poems with the '50 years Bollington Festival' logo in the top left corner, of which one is the above poem by Lynn Peters, an amusing feminist take on William Wordsworth entitled 'Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as famous as her brother': the link is to the words of the poem on Lynn Peters's website. Other poems I spotted were Tennyson's 'The Eagle', Ted Hughes's 'Wind', Megan Grumbling's 'Recipe for Rain', Carl Sandburg's 'Fog', William Blake's 'Jerusalem', and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'An Obstacle', which appropriately begins 'I was climbing up a mountain-path': that's just how it felt for us climbing to White Nancy today.
ADDENDUM: 'White Nancy' is also the name of a 4.1% beer brewed by the Bollington Brewing Co. microbrewery, which uses White Nancy as its logo.
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