The hidden corner of Scotland — just a few hours from Glasgow

This view blew Wordsworth’s mind. Not Grasmere or Windermere – but Loch Linnhe on Scotland’s west coast. When he first saw it during a strenuous Highland tour in the summer of 1803 with his sister, Dorothy, she noted their mutual delight in her journal. They could not “dream of fairer worlds than this”.

Linnhe is a 30-mile-long sea loch, and its water can be perfectly still – the word linne means “pool” in Gaelic.

It feels very remote, but isn’t totally out in the sticks – in fact it’s a taxi ride from Oban, itself a three-hour train journey from Glasgow. It’s one of the places I love to go to the most – and now it can be admired from the breathtaking vantage point of a new glass cabin called Stormhouse, which is curled into a wooded slope of rowan and red deer, 35m above sea level and facing due south near the village of Portnacroish. From here the Inner Hebridean islands of Lismore and Mull fall away beyond the windows towards the Firth of Lorn with a shimmering air of unreality.

I arrive during a heatwave – remember them? Everybody in the port town of Oban, not far from where I live, has slightly lost their minds with glee, wrestling blow-up paddleboards down to the beaches outside town. But beneath Stormhouse just a few meadow pipits survey the salty mudflats around the ancient Castle Stalker, jutting cutely from an islet close to shore. Stalker appears at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, approached in a dragonship made from what looks like raffia, hysteria and epoxy, and is perhaps Terry Gilliam’s most romantic creation. Tours are by appointment; be sure to book, they always sell out (castlestalker.com).

Sitting on the terrace at Stormhouse it crosses my mind to move, but I’m completely fixated by the famously abstract-expressionist Hebridean light, gathering in subtleties of apricot at the fringes of the pale green crofts that lead down to the loch. Unlikely colours seem flung about, anyhow and everywhere. A lone kayak crosses the water and a tall ship in the distance looks like HMS Bounty. There’s an hour or so of this, followed by a creeping lilac – soft purple loch eventually merging into soft purple sky. Imagine an archipelago in the Cyclades meeting an intergalactic set from the 1980 movie Flash Gordon and this might be it. How I love this panorama. My boyfriend’s 92-year-old mother, Betty (a lifelong Obanite), will often ask to be driven out this way, and whenever we approach a silence descends on the car, even on a grim day, with the sea booming and the rain – oh, the rain – slicking the scooped and ragged mountains of the Morvern peninsula, massed across the water.