Ardanaiseig by Arnie Wilson

One minute the bustling train, complete with obligatory squawking child, clanking Scotrail refreshment trolley, and the excited chatter of passengers is hugging the wooded shores of Scotland’s longest loch – the next you are alighting onto the platform of Loch Awe station into a world of almost total silence.

Paddy Shaw, a man of few words, makes little impact on the almost tangible hush, as he helps carry our luggage down the quayside steps to a handsome little steam-launch, the Lady Rowena.

Built almost three quarters of a century ago of mahogany and oak, the “wee steamer” spent 40 years on Lake Windermere before moving on to Argyll waters. Here she provides a gentle water-taxi service to one of Britain’s most romantic hotels.

Paddy fires up the engine and shovels peat into the big brass boiler. It is 1927 again, and in a moment our 21st century cares seem to have been washed away.

As we draw away from the brooding 15th century hulk of the ruins of Kilchurn Castle, a former stronghold of the Campbells of Glenorchy, the rapid but gentle chugging of the engine sends out a comforting message across the soundless loch, its mirror-like surface punctured only by the occasional gathering of mallard. On both sides, mountains rise in the mist as though to enclose and protect the valley from the real world. We are fortunate: there is no sign of Loch Awe’s monster, reputedly even bigger and fiercer than its counterpart in Loch Ness.

Profoundly peaceful as the scene is now, the Loch’s beginnings, it seems, were rather more tempestuous. According to Celtic legend, “high in the lofty corries of mighty Ben Cruachan” the goddess Bheithir used to bathe in the enchanted waters of a magic well to preserve her “ageless beauty”. But one fateful night, she forgot to replace the capstone on the sacred spring. “All night long the crystal waters poured from the mountainside and flooded the valley below to form Loch Awe.”

Unfortunately, Bheithir was punished by being transformed into the terrible Cailleach Bheithir, the “ancient winter hag of death and darkness”.

Ahead of us, now, we can see what appears to be a large country house, built of grey ragstone and surrounded by smooth green lawns with the loch lapping at a small pontoon.

The Ardanaiseig Hotel was built in baronial style, among beautiful woodland gardens, for Colonel Archibald Campbell in 1834. It is perched on the headland where Loch Awe divides, pushing a much smaller section north-west towards Loch Etive. The main loch sweeps on for another 25 miles. Highland cattle, rescued from the BSE cull and put out to grass, graze contentedly at the water’s edge close to the croquet lawn. Paddy kills the engine, and we drift silently onto our mooring.

Before we know it, the hotel manager is showing us to our room. The view is sublime: we are looking straight back down the loch whence we have just come. Behind it rear an assortment of rolling hills and mountains, dominated by Ben Lui.

The decor is striking: the walls are cherry-red, the armchairs royal blue. The hotel is owned by a mysterious figure called Professor Benjamin Gray, who owns a number of antiques warehouses in London. Every now and then a fresh consignment of antiques arrives to be distributed around the premises.

Our main wardrobe is Chinese, and intricately patterned in black lacquer. A gigantic ornamental tea-pot from Nepal sits on top of it. The room next door was recently the scene of a moment of black comedy when a friendly pipistrelle found its way in through a window during the small and hitherto very silent hours, sending the occupants into a panic. “The husband ran downstairs to raise the alarm while his wife just sat in bed screaming her head off”, the manager tells us. “We had to transfer them to another room, and catch the bat with a big fishing net.”

This is prime fishing and walking country. Salmon, pike, trout, char and perch abound. The walking possibilities are endless: hundreds of miles of hill, forest and lochside walks begin on the doorstep. We stroll along the banks of the River Avich and its waterfalls, through tightly-knit Caledonian forest, roots covered in a deep carpet of moss. It has the mysterious, slightly spine-tingling atmosphere of a fairy-tale forest dimly remembered from childhood picture-books. The spruces have a white sheen which lends them a wintry look, as though the first frost of winter has them in its grip. During the two mile walk to the shores of Loch Avich we do not meet another soul.

The nearest village of any size is 10 miles away, but the hotel gets most of his supplies from the Victorian port of Oban 21 miles away, where ferries ply to Skye, Mull, Iona and the outer islands.

Dinner is superb. The young chef, Gary Goldie, is obviously a find. He was recently named Scotland’s best chef by Der Feinschmecker, a German food magazine, which described him as “a shooting star among Scotland’s chefs de cuisine”.

The lobster ravioli is delicious, and the pan-fried seabass with seared scallops just as good. As for the prune and Armagnac soufflé, were it any lighter it would float up to the ceiling.

We leave the manager, an enthusiast, to choose the wine for us, and although, rather snootily, I subscribe to the ABC club (anything but Chardonnay) we are delighted with the Patz and Hall 1998 Napa Valley he selects. And the Grant Burge Barossa 1998 Merlot to follow.

The dining room is dominated by a large Victorian oil painting of an all-male dinner party onto which the former owner of Tokyo Joe’s – once a popular restaurant in London’s Soho – asked an artist to superimpose his favourite customers: Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart, Bryan Ferry, the playboy Gunther Sachs, Jimmy Goldsmith, the financier Jim Slater and Henry Kisssinger. The waiter’s face is that of Frank Sinatra. The painting is another of the hotel owner’s eccentric “finds”.

On our return to the Lady Rowena, to chug back, reluctantly, to the real world, there is just time for a glance at the visitors’ book. It is packed with verbal bouquets from enthusiastic Americans. One remark catches my eye: “Facing slavery in my Anglo-Saxon financial world, I will close my eyes and dream for a second of a place like this.” I hastily scribble below it: “I wanted to stop the world and get off. Mission accomplished.”