The new phenomenon of tourism at the most famous of all English landscape gardens made an unprecedented success of Benton Seeley's guide to Stowe. Numerous editions from 1744 into the 1830s reflected changes in the garden and created a model for later site-specific guidebooks. The grotto was originally designed by William Kent in the late 1730s as a symmetrical, freestanding structure decorated with flints, colored glass, and shells.
