It was already an easy twilight, in which all things were visible, when they came under the hanging roofs and bridges of this riverside hamlet.

It also brings forward the civil engineer called Tatyana Makarova, who in 1928 patented a hyperbolic paraboloid hanging roof and saw it taken up worldwide.

It boasted no less than four towers topped by golden domes and a hanging roof garden, but was run into the ground in the 18th century by the notorious Sir Herbert Lloyd, driven mad - so the legend goes - by a curse carried in the very stones of his mansion.