It was listed as being in ‘Cumbria - Lake District’, although in fact it’s about two miles north of the town of Alston in the North Pennines and well outside the national park.

“I almost turned back at the top of Hartside because it’s not really the Lake District,” jokes John. “Actually it was a lovely day, we got here, turned down the drive then this spectacular view of Clarghyll opened out and I thought, 'Yes, I want this house'.”

The nine-bedroom house has been much altered over 500 years and walking from room to room can involve stepping from one century to another.

The earliest record of a property on the site of Clarghyll Hall changing hands dates from the mid-16th century. Over the subsequent 500 years the house has been greatly enlarged to its current size, with the Whitfield family - who occupied Clarghyll for more than 200 years - and a Victorian clergyman called Octavius James making the biggest impressions on the property.

Visitors to the house never fail to be impressed by the Great Hall. The room, which is more than 35ft long, has a 30ft high vaulted ceiling with Scandinavian pine hammer beams, Gothic-style stone mullioned windows and stained glass featuring grapes and sheaves of corn.

It looks and feels like a chapel and was added to Clarghyll Hall by the Rev Octavius James, the rector of nearby Kirkhaugh. It was never used as a chapel, however, and was in fact a dining room for the Rev James and his large family.

Octavius had inherited money and as JP and landowner, he was a so-called ‘squarson’ or a cross between a squire and parson. A breeder of bulls, he was known as ‘old hell’ by his family and may have had a drink problem.

In a plot twist that could have come from a Dickensian novel, Octavius died in 1889 in a fire, said to have been caused by a candle, which broke out in his study and chapel. The chapel ruins can still be seen today.

The first room visitors encounter at Clarghyll is the Elizabethan dining room in the oldest part of the building. Dating from about 1560, it was originally a bastle or fortified farmhouse designed with small windows and an oak beam barricade to protect it from raids by the notorious Reivers.

A spice cupboard is engraved with the initials NW for Nicholas Whitfield and the date 1688, which is thought to refer to the year of the Glorious Revolution, the overthrow of James II and the ascendancy of William of Orange, revealing the Whitfield family’s political affiliations.

Another original feature is a Jacobean bed press or boxed bed which may have been the sleeping place for a servant boy charged with tending the fire.

The room at the top of the tower was used by one of Octavius’s daughters, Wilhelmina, who was an author writing under the male pseudonym Austen Clare.

John thought he might have stumbled across a lesser-known Emily Brontë, who was also published under a male pseudonym, until he bought a selection of Wilhelmina’s novels and realised they weren’t great works of literature.

He still feels the weight of history at Clarghyll: “When you walk round you kind of think, oh gosh, there have been people doing this for 500 years.”

* This article appeared in the November issue of Cumbria Life