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.’ The flames give a crackling warmth and smoke swirls up the vast chimney, down which whooshes, periodically, the thunder of a passing train. I recognise this as the sound of ‘Noony’ from Garner’s most recent novel, Treacle Walker. I perch on a low beam and Garner tells me that this is where his protagonist Joe Coppock sits. ‘The chimney wrote Treacle Walker, I didn’t,’ says Garner.

‘The first-generation academic has an adolescence of isolation because to the family the child becomes a pariah’

When Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Garner became the oldest author ever to make the list. He’ll be 90 this year and his writing career spans 67 years. His books, which engage with local landscape and folklore, have earned him a place in the line of great British fantasy writers between J.R.R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman. Some, like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Owl Service, are ostensibly for children; others, like Red Shift, Boneland and Treacle Walker, are decidedly not.

When Joseph Coppock sits in my low fireside seat, the mysterious character Treacle Walker sits across from him, leans his head back and looks up the stack, describing the chimney as: ‘Axis mundi… the heart of all that is. The sky turns on it. It is the way between.’ Garner and I discuss the chimney being a ‘way between’, and we soon come on to what the writer terms ‘liminality’ in his work. ‘I have always been fascinated by boundaries, both spatial and temporal,’ he says. ‘I’ve never liked New Year’s Eve.’ Spatial boundaries are given particular weight in his books: the chimney and also the doorstep in Treacle Walker, and Goldenstone in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – an ancient boundary marker on nearby Alderley Edge.

Garner was the first in his family to have a formal education: ‘My family were excited – “Alan’s going to get an education” – but I realised later that it was almost like a three-dimensional object, like “Alan’s going to get a car, Alan’s going to get a tree”.’ He laughs. ‘And then I came home feeling excited by irregular verbs and bang – “Why are you making me look like a fool, you and your airy-fairy ways?”’

Manchester Grammar School was not an easy time for Garner but, he hastens to add, ‘This isn’t a sob story’ and ‘A lot of young people experience this’. He says: ‘What happens is that the first-generation academic has an adolescence of extreme isolation because to the family the child becomes a pariah and to the surrounding middle classes an upstart. The only place I could become me was at school. The place where I felt at home was not my home. I was just left hanging.’

After Manchester Grammar, and a stint of National Service, Garner went up to read Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, but his time there was brief. At the start of his second year, Garner voiced his doubts about continuing and his tutor told him, simply: ‘You’d better go down now.’ The author compares it to a folktale about a pedlar in Swaffham, Norfolk, who dreams of finding gold at London Bridge, only to eventually discover it buried in his own backyard. Aged 22, Garner knew he wanted to write, and realised that he needed to be back home in Cheshire to do so: ‘My gold was here, in my backyard.’

Or not quite in his backyard. Although Garner had started The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, ‘I couldn’t write it in my parents’ house,’ he says. He had a recurring dream about ‘the ideal house’, an old building from where he could see Alderley Edge. Determined to find it, he took to bicycling around on Mondays, reckoning a house was more likely to be empty if there were no clothes hanging out to dry on ‘wash day’. In 1957, through a series of events and encounters that feels more than a little like a folktale (directions from an old man, crossing a threshold, his father going to the tavern to procure the money…), Garner bought half of the medieval building Toad Hall, which stands beside the Old Medicine House, where we’re currently sitting. A few months later, Garner bought the other half, even though it was in such a ‘shocking condition’ that he had to overcome a closing order from ‘the local sanitary man’. Here he finished The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and went on to write The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor and The Owl Service. It was only after The Owl Service was adapted for television in 1969 and Garner wrote the script that he could afford to make basic improvements to the house: ‘Out of nowhere, there was enough money to connect to the electricity.’

In need of more space – ‘My library was increasing and so was the family’ – Garner wanted to extend Toad Hall in a sympathetic manner. His architect alerted them to a nearby timber-framed Tudor building which was due to be demolished, with the idea of reusing some of its oak beams, but Garner decided to rescue the entire house and move it the 18 miles to Toad Hall. It cost just £1 to purchase the Old Medicine House (so called because from 1870-1969 it was used as a factory for patent medicines), but Garner knew that the process of taking the house apart, labelling, moving and then reassembling it would cost a great deal more.

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With this in mind, he arranged lunch with his publisher ‘Billy’ Collins, bringing along a shoe from a protective ‘cache’ he’d found stuffed inside the walls, and succeeded in persuading him to fund it. The house was riddled with protective charms like the cache of shoes and leather bags, including witch marks scored into the corners of the chimney beams.

This vast chimney, Garner’s in-between space, is ‘full of creative thoughts’ that inspire conversation. Garner enthuses about the many people who have sat here and talked with him over the years: ‘We’ve found a common ground and – whooph, something new has happened.’ It was here, talking to a friend, the astrophysicist Bob Cywinski, that ideas for Treacle Walker began to form. Garner recalls asking him: ‘Is it possible for time to move backwards?’ Cywinski replied that he’d ‘seen it happen’ in the lab. Jodrell Bank Observatory is just ‘two fields away’ and the space telescope, along with its associated science, is as much an influence on Garner’s work as other aspects of Cheshire landscape and lore. As we eat – from original Owl Service plates on our laps – Garner explains the basics of quantum theory to me: ‘When we are looking at the sky on a starlit night, we are looking at a mosaic of time past… It works at every level: you’re looking at me and I’m looking at you, in the past. There is no now – that’s really the heart of Treacle Walker.’ He reflects on the book’s conception: ‘It was just Bob and I banging our ideas together in the chimney.’

Garner’s books tend to begin with such a collision of ideas: ‘Nuclear fusion takes place and I know that I’m pregnant.’ Over time ‘it starts to form an embryonic beginning of a foetus’, which directs his research, involving extensive reading and note-taking, enjoying the process of making connections between different areas before he enters ‘a period of latency’. Garner gestures towards a sofa: ‘I lie on there and I play music and I don’t think, I just don’t think… I’m diverting my intellect so that the unconscious can get on with it.’ For Treacle Walker, he listened to Russian Orthodox church music; for Red Shift it was Jimi Hendrix, ‘especially “Voodoo Child”… on loud’. Over the years this ‘gestation’ period has grown longer. Then, when the book is finally ready, ‘it says,“Wake up, Alan, start writing”.’/>