Just sometimes, you have to stop and thank the gods of television that your random channel surfing brought you to the start of an absolute gem of a program. A program that contained fear, danger, dreams, hopes, frustrations, and, in the end, triumph over adversity.

No I’m not talking about a new television drama. It’s the real-life story of how an ordinary architect and his family fulfilled his childhood dream to live in a castle. A castle that started out as this crumbling ruin and ended up three years later as a stunning family home.

Francis Shaw was just seven years old when he decided he wanted to live in a castle. Fair enough you say, there must be hundreds of seven year old boys who dress up as King Arthur and want the same thing. But Francis grew into a man who not only didn’t lose his boyhood longing, he was someone who could make his dream come true.

Hellifield Peel – a castellated tower in the middle of an idyllic countryside setting between Skipton and Settle – was built in the 1300s to ward off the marauding Scots. When Francis first saw it he was 14 years old, holidaying with his parents in the area. It was just a shell of a building, and a crumbling shell at that. So much so that it was on English Heritage’s "Buildings at Risk" register, and it was on this list that an older Francis, now an architect, found it in 2003.

"When I saw it on the Buildings at Risk Register, I remembered it immediately," he says.

Listed for demolition 50 years earlier, the Peel had no roof and only a single remaining interior wall. where trees and shrubs had taken root. It had not been occupied since the Second World War, when it was used to house prisoners of war. When they left the building was gutted and left to rot.

Francis and his wife Karen bought the shell for £160,000 along with a two acre plot. Having sold their house for £400,000 and set up a mortgage for another £210,000 they had their budget, and Francis had drawn up the plans himself to save money. They also planned to project manage the build and do some of the labouring.

With the backstory filled in, the programme really came to life when the build started in earnest. The process of clearing out the accumulated rubble and detritus from the interior space caused the last remaining interior wall to collapse and raised worries about the stability of the rest of the structure. English Heritage were on hand regularly to oversee the restoration. I found it very strange that, had it not been for the Shaws Hellifield Peel would certainly have become a pile of stone within a few years, and yet having decided to restore it, English Heritage could tell them what they could and couldn’t do. This made their already daunting task even harder, longer and more expensive. Even digging the ditches for a geothermal ground loop heating system had to be held up while an archaeologist checked the holes for interesting odds and sods. The cost for these archaeological checks alone came to £20,000.

But that was the smallest of the staggering numbers that were thrown up during the course of the build. The amount of stone needed for the project was staggering. 100 tons for the walls, 50 tons for the interior arches and pilasters, 60 tons to recreate the crenellated roof first added in 1440 after agreement from Henry VI. All this stone had to come from a single quarry – English Heritage approved of course. The quarry provided a very high quality fine grain buff coloured sandstone – ideal for the detailed work and sharp edges the Shaw’s wanted to include in the house.

Then: disaster! Halfway through the build the quarry went bust! Some of the stone was already dug and was making its way out of the quarry in dribs and drabs, but it wasn’t enough to finish the job. They were faced with the prospect of having to find another quarry, match the colour of the stone, and gain English Heritage approval all over again. Months of further delay. Luckily at the eleventh hour the quarry was saved by a management buy-out and their source was secured.

The hand-built solid oak staircase cost £55,000. When the first section arrived on site it took a full day for the builders to haul it to the top floor.

With delays caused by bad weather, English Heritage inspections, interruption of the stone supply and a host of other hardships, the project had absorbed over six months extra time and money, so the Shaws had to go back to the bank and extend their mortgage to £300,000. They were living on their credit cards, and Karen had a full-time job managing the cash flow and paying the bills. Meanwhile Francis still had an architecture practice to run.

But the real revelation for me was the stonemasons. A couple of ordinary guys who were given the challenge of recreating 14th century stone work and 15th century crenellations, and rose to that challenge remarkably. The head stonemason remarked that most people who work in his craft never got the chance, in their entire lifetime, to do even one of the things he had been called upon to do in the course of the project. And there were probably half a dozen examples of such rare and beautiful work all through the house. Flared arches; an enormous stone-built kitchen fireplace to house the Aga; replacement mullions; and of course the true mark of a castle: the roof.

Actually the roof is a success story in its own right. Francis managed to convince English Heritage to let him do something totally different with it. He built a pyramid. And then took one of its sides off and glazed the gap, giving the family both a roof terrace and a delightful family room with stunning views over the North Yorkshire countryside. The EH inspector took the view that every family who had lived in the castle since it was built had added something unique to its structure, so why shouldn’t the Shaws be allowed to do the same. This attitude met with huge cheers in our house and I instantly forgave English Heritage all their anal attention to period detail in the whole of the rest of the project!

Two years after work started, the castle was weathertight and the major construction work was complete. But Francis and Karen were mortgaged to the hilt and broke, and the house remained undressed. It took a further year of hard personal graft and gallons of lime wash to turn the castle into a home. Even now, some rooms remain incomplete, but the hall, lounge, kitchen, family bedrooms and the stunning roof room are all finished.

The final spend was something in the region of three quarters of a million pounds. "What we did spend sounds a lot but before we bought it someone else had an estimate for £700,000 just to create the shell," says Francis. What he, Karen and their two girls Harriet and Morgen have is a stunning family home with seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms.

Francis won’t be selling up any time soon. "We intend to be here for a long time," he says. "They will probably have to take me out in a box."