I have never been so happy to see a wooden wall in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Manchester, two flights, a train to Hamar, and a hire car that smelled faintly of fish, I finally pulled up at the Koppang in Hedmark. My phone had died somewhere near Elverum, I had eaten nothing but a petrol station hot dog since Oslo, and I had just spent twenty minutes driving in circles because I trusted Google Maps over the handwritten directions the owner had sent me. The mishap? I tried to open what I was absolutely convinced was the front door. It was the woodshed. The actual entrance was three metres to the left, helpfully marked with a small wooden reindeer I had somehow missed while wrestling with a padlock and muttering increasingly un-Christian things under my breath.

The owner, a lovely woman called Ingrid who appeared silently as if teleported from the pines, watched this entire performance with the patient expression of someone who has seen this exact scene many times before. She did not laugh out loud, which I appreciated, though her eyes definitely did. I laughed for both of us, that slightly hysterical laugh of the overtired traveller who has forgotten what sleep feels like.

Stepping inside proper, the first thing that hit me was the smell. Not the fish of the car, thank Christ, but proper wood: pine, slightly smoky, the kind of scent that makes you want to exhale for the first time in months. The Koppang is one of those traditional Norwegian cabins, all timber walls and low ceilings and a wood-burning stove that dominates the living area like a grumpy but reliable relative. Ingrid had left it ticking over, and the warmth after the October chill outside felt almost indecently good. I stood there in my coat for a full minute, just letting my face thaw.

The place is compact, no getting around that. A small kitchen with a view over nothing but trees, a dining table that seats four at a squeeze, and a ladder-steep staircase up to a sleeping loft where I immediately banged my head. I said something unprintable. Ingrid, still hovering politely by the door, pretended not to hear. I am thirty-seven years old and apparently still incapable of judging ceiling height.

What struck me most, once the embarrassment subsided, was the quiet. Not silence exactly - there was wind in the spruce, the occasional creak of the cabin settling, a distant river I could not yet see - but the absence of human noise. No traffic, no planes, no neighbour's television bleeding through walls. I have lived in cities my whole adult life and had forgotten that this kind of quiet exists. It felt almost aggressive at first, like the landscape was demanding something of me. Attention, perhaps. Or humility.

I made a hash of lighting the proper fire later, because of course I did, using far too much paper and creating a small smoke problem that had me flapping about with a tea towel like a demented penguin. But eventually it caught, and I sat there with a cup of tea that tasted of triumph and slight asphyxiation, watching the flames and feeling something in my chest unclench that I had not realised was clenched.

The woodshed door, I noticed, had a better view of the valley than the actual windows. Typical.