The history man

In fact, the sale related to only half of the timber-framed building in Blackden Heath; it had been divided into two tied cottages, the mark still visible on the ceiling of what is now the kitchen. “I just walked into the only house I could ever live in,” says Alan, who will be 70 in October. “As soon as I saw it I thought, ‘I can’t leave here.’ It was just intuition.”

After ten minutes the owner agreed a sale at the price he had paid eight years before: £510. “But I only had eight shillings and threepence,” says Alan. When he told his father, back in the family’s 18th-century cottage seven miles away in Alderley Edge, where the Garners have lived for more than 300 years, “he shook his head, pursed his lips, but after half an hour he said I could have the money.”

Alan moved in and 18 months later bought the other half of the hall for £150. “We still refer to that room as Mrs Carter’s, the woman who lived there,” he says. “When she left we found 500 day-old chicks in there.”

It is in this medieval hall, in a room known as The Buttery, where liquor and expensive food were once stored, that Alan has written all his books. They include The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service, which won two literary prizes and was made into a television series by Granada, and his latest work, Thursbitch. Today there is no desk, computer or even typewriter, as Alan , who was appointed OBE in 2001 for services to literature, writes by hand, sitting in a low upholstered chair, his pad resting on a board on his knee. The author has a keen interest in history and archaeology and knows every piece of timber in the room, some of which have been subjected to dendrochronology.

The sound of trains rattling by on the adjacent Manchester to London railway line, opened in 1840, is no deterrent to his writing. Jodrell Bank observatory, home to the 76m Lovell telescope, is almost as close but is eerily silent.

The original hall, known locally as T’Owd Hall before the Garners changed the spelling, is now only half of the home owned by Alan and his wife Griselda after a unique “extension” was added in 1971. “We had three children by then and needed more space,” says Alan. “But my priority was to interfere not at all with the medieval building I was learning a lot about, and am still learning about nearly 50 years later.”

Instead they bought, for £1 “because legally money had to change hands”, a 500-year-old timber-framed Tudor medicine house 20 miles away in Wrinehill, Staffordshire, which was due for demolition to make way for road widening. “That road has never been changed,” says Alan wryly. “But it took four men and one apprentice, using only block and tackle, nine working days to dismantle the house and deliver it here. It was three lorry loads and three mounds of very carefully numbered pieces of wood.”

Alan monitored every stage of the 18-month rebuilding, captured on 4,000 slides that Griselda recently catalogued. “What was so important for us emotionally was that the medicine house did not become a museum piece — it had to be lived in,” he says.

Then came the quandary of how to link the two together. Alan and the architect never spared a thought for the idea of a “mock old England” structure but agreed on a design typical of its time, the early 1970s. And so they built a glass and aluminium link, whose floor is laid with bricks from the streets of Crewe and rescued from a slum clearance tip, for which they paid a penny each. The back wall is also of brick, predominantly black but which reflects other colours as it catches the light.

“We think it is extraordinary and it works. It is not in competition with the other buildings, nor is it, in the Prince of Wales’s wonderful phrase, a ‘carbuncle’.”

Today the medicine house, where once apothecaries mixed their potions, provides wonderful spaces — “rooms” is an unworthy description. The ground floor is divided by what is thought to be the only surviving timber-framed chimney, 10ft 6in square and 27ft high.

Along one wall is Alan’s grandfather’s workbench on which he has assembled a timeline for the site, thought to date from about 11,000 years ago. Small plastic boxes and bowls hold finds from the grounds, including flint artefacts, a Roman cloak pin, a piece of Tudor pottery and a 19th-century inkwell.

Alan and his wife are passionate about the house and are constantly adding to their now encyclopaedic knowledge of its history, of vernacular building materials and styles.

They are equally concerned about the site, deemed “pure” by archaeologists who have made a few tentative excavations. “I’ve spent my adult energies preserving it from damage and from the predations of others, but it is now worth so much money it would have to be sold on our deaths,” he explains. “The only people who could afford it would be the very people I’ve been saving it from. Can you imagine: ‘We want a swimming pool, remove that bump’. And so a Bronze Age burial mound is removed.”

Instead the Garners are forming a trust that will manage the site, offering space to students and academics “for long-term scholarly investigations” or for the completion of a particular piece of work.

Alan, who is reticent about plans for his next book, admitting only to “knowing I’m pregnant but the morning sickness stage is not over yet”, says he no longer likes going out of range of the house very often. “I may be verging on the neurotic, it may be that I’m a curmudgeon, but I feel safe here,” he says.

Thursbitch is published in paperback by Vintage on September 2, price £6.99