Born in 1760, this talented heir to a Jamaican sugar fortune was rumoured to be the wealthiest man in Britain. But at age 19 he fell in love with the 10-year-old son of an earl and began an affair so scandalous that he was obliged to spend a decade in exile.

These were not wasted years, however. By the time he returned to England and his estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire, he had published Vathek, an influential and erotic Oriental-Gothic novel, and had amassed a vast collection of artworks.

It was partly to provide a fitting home for this treasure, and partly to house his harem of boys, that Beckford decided to rebuild the mansion at Fonthill. Having shielded the estate from public gaze with a three-and-a-half-metre high wall, some 11 kilometres long, he hired the fashionable but dissolute architect James Wyatt and together they planned the most fantastical building in the land. Fonthill Abbey was half-house, half-folly (its owner was quickly dubbed the Fool of Fonthill) and was inspired by a Swiss monastery, where Beckford had sojourned.

This early attempt at Gothic revival may have mimicked the forms of medieval Christianity, but there was certainly nothing church-like in its spirit. Those who visited this social outcast (including Lords Byron and Nelson) said Fonthill was the embodiment of a nightmare.

Entered through vast doors rendered vaster by the dwarfs who opened them, the building massed around an 84m high octagonal tower intended to dwarf Salisbury Cathedral. However, it was this centrepiece that was to rob posterity of an architectural wonder, because in 1825 it collapsed. It was built too quickly and by men who understood little of medieval construction.

Today, even those ruins are gone, leaving only one pathetic wing as a monument to Fonthill’s extraordinary creator.