A set of pictures has been all over the internet in the past 24 hours – they are of Berkyn Manor, a dilapidated old house in Horton near Slough, Berkshire, which has been abandoned since the death of its owner in 1987. They’re haunting, fascinating glimpses into a life, and into a collapsing building that was formerly a home, and are given added piquancy by the fact that no lesser a literary figure than John Milton once lived there, between 1636, or a little earlier, and 1638, a detail lending itself to many excellent Paradise Lost headlines.

Milton would have been in his mid-to late 20s while living in Berkyn Manor, which his family had rented. He’d left Cambridge, where he’d been recognised “as a nascent poet (he had published verses in both Latin and English) and a polemical and incendiary rhetorician”, and “returned to his parents’ house to pursue further private study”. In 1637, he would write Lycidas, after a friend of his drowned: “He must not flote upon his watry bear / Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, / Without the meed of som melodious tear.”

So despite the headlines, it’s not as if Berkyn Manor was the place where he wrote his most famous work – described by Thomas Ellwood as “that pretty box in Giles, Chalfont”, Milton’s Cottage is not at all dilapidated, and is open to the public – or where he lived the longest. But in this age of fetishisation of authors’ homes, it seems odd that a place where a writer of the might and stature of Milton once lived has been so utterly forgotten.

There have, after all, been successful campaigns to save William Blake’s cottage, and Edith Wharton’s huge Massachusetts property the Mount. You can visit Edgar Allan Poe’s house, after it was reopened last year, or Agatha Christie’s, Jane Austen’s or Byron’s – just take a look at this gallery).

I’ve been genuinely moved by Keats’ Rome residence, where you can see his life and death masks, and his tiny bed, but I’ve not made trips to many other authors’ homes: the Brontë parsonage, Dylan Thomas’s Laugharne hut, and Keats’ Hampstead home are about it. Looking at Nick Channer’s gallery, I’d love to see the home which inspired Lucy M Boston’s Greenknowe books, and the huge mansion which set Frances Hodgson Burnett on the road to The Secret Garden.

And who knows what the future holds for Berkyn Manor? Perhaps a group of campaigners will take up its cause, or perhaps it will continue to crumble slowly away, a victim of “envious time”– that enemy to us all which Milton puts firmly in its place here.