Alan Garner is sitting in a high-backed leather porter’s chair right inside the hearth enclosure of an immense fireplace, with a chimney stack stretching up 27ft and a very strange-looking firepit.

I duck under a beam to join him. He adds a log to the fire and says: ‘This firepit is made from a disused steam engine we found in an old lead mine and the rear brake-drum of a Model T Ford lorry.’