Google Hopwood DePree and you’ll come across multiple photos of a chap who looks like he could have been in the Brat Pack: shaggy blonde hair, blue eyes, teeth as straight as sugar cubes, wide Hollywood grin.

Look him up further on the film database, IMDB, and you’ll discover that Hopwood has indeed acted, albeit not in any high school flick. He was once a 1995 film called Rhinoskin, starring as an actor trying to make it in the business, and a couple of other parts followed, but it’s probably fair to say he hasn’t been overly burdened by invitations to the Oscars ceremony since.

Even so, why would a handsome, 40-something actor more used to the bars and gyms of Los Angeles relocate to a small, damp town outside Rochdale, unless it was for an exciting new project being shot by Scorsese?

He didn’t move for a project being shot by Scorsese; he moved for a house. A 15th-century Grade II wreck of red brick with 60 freezing rooms, over 800 leaking windows, a sagging roof and a ghost of a woman in a bonnet (naturally). Why did he do this? Because the house is also called Hopwood.

In the first chapter of this book – part memoir, part Grand Designs manual – Hopwood explains that not long after he turned 40, both his grandfather and his father died, leaving him flailing around his bougainvillea-strewn house in Hollywood, observing a prophetic crack in his outdoor hearth. Looking for links to those he’s lost, he reaches for his laptop and scrolls through an ancestry website only to discover a place called Hopwood Hall, just outside Manchester. “Could Hopwood Hall be the Hopwood Castle my grandfather always told me about?”