With no television or phone signal, we had no option but to disconnect from everyday life and appreciate the woods, rivers and fells

If you want to reach Shank Wood log cabin, the key is to keep going: to the very top of England; deep into the woods; right to the edge of a river. As we drove through pockmarked fields, and down bumpy dirt tracks, steeling ourselves for a steep, muddy descent, I began to realise just how isolated our home for the next few days would be.

The cabin, with its moss-covered roof and walls made from stacked sitka spruce logs, could have been lifted straight from the pages of a children’s book. Perched above the River Lyne, in Shank Wood ancient woodlands in the very north of Cumbria, it lived up to its billing on the website as “the real secluded log cabin experience”.