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Just before Christmas 1943, the people of Tyneham were evicted from their homes when the army suddenly requisitioned the village to extend its firing range. As they left, one of the villagers pinned a note to the church door: “Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.”

It was hope misplaced. Sixty years later, the houses are ruins and the few surviving villagers are no nearer to returning. On days when the firing range is not in use, you can walk round The Lost Village of Tyneham, a popular tourist attraction, and very sad it is too.

Five miles inland, Corfe Castle is a tooth-achingly pretty place, the castle ruins and the town’s old houses featuring on almost every box of Dorset fudge. The castle was once one of the greatest in England, built by the Normans and impregnable for over 400 years.

During the Civil War, it was defended heroically but if unsuccessfully by a tiny garrison under the command of Dame Mary Bankes. The victorious Roundheads pulled it down; the walls were so thick that its destruction was probably one of the 17th-century’s greatest feats of civil engineering, although had they waited only 50 years more, developments in weapon technology would have rendered the castle strategically redundant.

After the Restoration, the Bankes family built their new home 15 miles north-east at Kingston Lacy near Wimborne where the contours of the Dorset hills are softer and of no strategic importance. You reach the house along the B3082, one of the most beautiful roads in England, 2∫ miles long, straight with hidden dips and 365 mature beech trees standing on either side and arching overhead, one for every day of the year. Lawrence of Arabia, a fugitive from fame, often rode it at speed on his vast Brough Superior motorbike; no helmet, just a pair of goggles, the wind in his hair, the smell of burning oil and the slow, steady thump of the exhaust, one for every tree. He believed that through speed you could lose yourself.

The beeches were planted in 1835 by William John Bankes, great-great-great grandson of Dame Mary, a friend of Lord Byron and a talented artist. For much of the 20th-century, this was as close to Kingston Lacy as you could get. No visitors were welcome. It was the most mysterious house in England, something lost behind the trees, a decaying, overgrown palazzo housing one of the greatest private art collections in the world.

The original house was designed by Sir Roger Pratt, a follower of Inigo Jones, then rebuilt rather badly in the 18th century. William John employed the architect Sir Charles Barry to restore it in even grander style, filling the house with paintings and the garden with Egyptian antiquities. He did not enjoy his home for long. Arrested after an incident with a guardsman in Hyde Park in 1841, he jumped bail and fled the country. As arrest warrants could not be served on Sundays, he often took an early morning boat across the Channel to spend the day at Kingston Lacy, returning to France before midnight, or so it was said.

Over the next century, the family became increasingly odd and the house went into a decline. Its last owner, Ralph Bankes, lived in four rooms and kept the rest locked up. According to the National Trust brochure, he inherited his father’s “solitary nature”.

Once, when short of funds — rents on the estate were not put up for 50 years — he accepted some government money for essential house repairs on condition that he opened it to the public. What he spent the money on was never discovered apart from some new plastic lampshades in the library, and the doors remained shut.

The last heir of Kingston Lacy was Ralph’s son John. Like many summer days in Dorset, his life started brightly but soon clouded over. He did well at school and took a double first at Oxford in natural sciences, but in his early 20s he began to lose interest in life.

When I first met him, he had just bought a house in Fulham, but although he often talked about having some furniture sent down from Kingston Lacy he never did, and he slept on the floor surrounded by books. The only things he brought were some original Edward Lears, which he lent to his local pub, and a Botticelli drawing, which he hung in the kitchen (perhaps it was the only hook in the house).

He never locked the front door because he had lost the keys shortly after moving in. A Spanish language school took over the ground floor, uninvited or taking advantage of his good nature, and the Botticelli was stolen. About that time, Ralph decided that John was not a suitable person to inherit a large estate, and he made over the whole lot to the National Trust — not just the house and contents but 16,000 acres including Corfe Castle, hundreds of houses and cottages and most of the Purbeck coast between Swanage and Bournemouth. The National Trust described it as a “most generous gift”, as well they might.

I am probably in a small minority in thinking that the National Trust in not an entirely admirable organisation. Perhaps I am put off by the proprietorial air of the impeccably mannered grey-haired volunteers with their unwavering determination to sign us up as members, like upper-class Jehovah’s Witnesses. And if you or I were made an unexpected and possibly undeserved present worth well into nine figures, I doubt if we would have the nerve to charge visitors £3.50 for a small bottle of beer.

Perhaps it is the whole business of conservation, turning real places into sterile theme parks. The Tasteful Restoration Of The House Of Usher would not have been one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more successful short stories. The trouble with lost gardens and houses is that people keep finding them. Every time I get back from holiday, I am only grateful that the National Trust hasn’t stuck a large sign on my front door saying “The Lost Garden of Stockwell”.

My favourite gardens are neither formal nor wild but feral, where bluebells and dog roses colonise the lawns and flowerbeds, the box and yew take on genuine organic shapes, and there is the possibility that there might once have been a path through the rhododendrons leading to a secret valley. It isn’t the same when you put in neat gravel paths with a signpost saying “Secret Valley”.

The new gardeners at Kingston Lacy have done a competent job, but the trouble with having paying visitors year round is that you feel obliged to have something to show them. All good gardens, have times, even in summer, when none of the best plants are in flower; and the Kingston Lacy gardeners, like those in most public gardens, have had to resort to bedding plants and the usual bog-standard begonias.

The house, though “restored to its Edwardian heyday” and no longer in danger of falling down (if it ever was), has also lost much of its magic. Many of the paintings have been downgraded. In the catalogue, the big names are frequently prefixed by “school of” or “after” or “in the style of”. There was no sign of Ralph’s lampshades. Perhaps they have been sent for restoration, although I doubt it.

I was pleased to see a photograph of him, standing rather uneasily in a naval uniform. He looked a decent, honorable and rather lost person, much like John.

The National Trust has “preserved” Ralph’s living room, although probably not in a form that he would have recognised. Upstairs in a bathroom, a carefully placed pre-war container of Ajax is expected to add authenticity.

I wondered which of the attics had been John’s room as a child, but the polite volunteer ladies had never heard of him. There was not even a photograph of him anywhere in the house. In the general restoration, he has been removed from the picture, and in the catalogue the family tree stops abruptly with Ralph.

The last time I saw John was about 15 years ago. He was wandering the streets in a tattered suit, his hair and beard long and uncared for. I suggested we went for a beer, but he didn’t want to. People like him aren’t welcome in pubs. Ironic considering how many pubs in Dorset bear his family name. He died shortly afterwards, for no particular reason.

The traffic was slow as we drove back from Kingston Lacy to the coast. On the car radio, David Gray was singing What We Gonna Do When The Money Runs Out? Outside Poole, a large container lorry was parked between a couple of police cars partially blocking the road. Through a gap in the traffic, I momentarily saw two Afghan tribesmen kneeling in handcuffs on the grass, the expressions on their faces unlike anything you often see in real life, more like something you see in paintings. They were a long way from home, now even further from the place they would have chosen as home. The police were wandering about unconcerned, all in a day’s work. Nobody cares about lost people.

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