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The Temple of Venus, designed by John Donowell for Sir Francis Dashwood’s West Wycombe estate, c.1748.

Dashwood was one of the founders of the infamous drinking and whoring ‘Hell Fire Club’, and this vista is a deliberate genital pun: The hill is known as the ‘Mound of Venus’ (in Latin, mons veneris, usual term for the pubic mound), while the oval, vagina-esque door to ‘Venus’ Parlour’ is topped by a clitoral stone sphere and statue of Mercury. John Wilkes, acknowledging the joke, referred to the door as “the same Entrance by which we all come into the World… what some idle Wits have called the Door of Life” (1763).