To reserve a week in a stone hut in the Apennines, you need an introduction first

One stone room on the western flank of the Maiella, 1,380 meters up, four kilometers from the nearest car. This is the rung where the office is not optional: it does not exist without an introduction. You can reserve a week in a stone hut in the Apennines because a number was handed to us, and the family who own the roof answer nobody else.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

One room, seventy centimetre walls

The building is one room, five and a half meters by four, with a stone roof and walls about seventy centimetres thick. It went up as a shepherd's shelter and has been re-roofed twice since. Inside: a bed, a table, two chairs, a wood stove, a two ring gas burner fed from a bottle, a stone sink, and shelves holding whatever the last people left behind. Two hundred watts of panel on the south pitch runs three lamps and one socket, which will charge a telephone overnight and will not run a computer. Water arrives by gravity from a spring seventy vertical meters below the door, cold and constant; in a dry September it slows to a thread and you fill jerricans in the morning instead. There is a crate of split beech by the stove and more under a tarpaulin at the back. The lavatory is a composting one in a lean to, eleven steps outside, which at two in the morning in October is a real distance. There is no shower. There is a galvanised tub, a kettle, and a black bag you hang in the sun by ten and use at five.

Four kilometers that decide it

A hire car reaches a gravel turning place at 1,010 meters, and that is where the road ends. From there it is 4.1 kilometers and 380 meters of climb on a stony track through beech wood; loaded, most people take an hour and forty minutes going up and an hour coming down. In dry weather the family who keep the hut will run your bags to within nine hundred meters of the door on a small four wheel drive. After heavy rain they will not, because the ruts on the second bend take a wheel to the axle, and then you carry. Plan your food on the assumption that you are carrying. The nearest village with a shop is fourteen kilometers of hairpins away; it opens 07:30 to 13:00 and 16:30 to 19:30, shut on Sunday and on Wednesday afternoon, with a butcher three doors along on the same hours. Arrive on a Sunday and you eat what you brought. If you come by air, your own flight into the coast lands about seventy minutes from the turning place, and the drive is unremarkable until the final six kilometers, which are single track with passing places and a drop on the left.

Above the beech line, where the water stops

Above the hut the beech thins at about 1,700 meters and gives out, and after that the ground is bare gray limestone, folded, fissured and grassed only in the hollows. It is karst, so it drinks: there is no surface water above the spring line at all. Go up and you carry two and a half litres a person, and you bring the empty bottles back down. Three walks leave the door and need no map after the first day, of two, four and seven hours, and one long one climbs onto the high ground above 2,400 meters and takes eleven. On a Tuesday in June you will meet nobody on any of them. There are wolves in this range and a small number of brown bears in the wider park; you will very probably see neither, and the sensible response is to keep food indoors rather than to sit up hoping. Evenings are the stove, whatever you carried, and a dark that is complete by nine in September with nothing much to do in it. Some people find the fourth day long. Some people find the fourth day is the whole point.

Why the office is in this one

Every week in this catalog carries a line about how much of it you could have set up without us, and there are four possible answers. This one sits on the last: it does not exist without an introduction. That is a fact about the owners rather than a claim about the office. They are a family with sheep and other work; the hut is listed nowhere, returns nothing to a search, and the number belongs to a woman who answers between seven and eight in the evening and has no English. It was handed to us in 2021 by someone we had sent four reservations to, who had it from a brother in law. So here is the whole of what happens. A telephone call in Italian, dates agreed, then a sketch map, a photograph of the turning place, and the name of the man who meets you with the key. After that you are alone, which is the arrangement and the reason the week works at all. From $2,180 per person covers the seven nights, the wood, the gas, the linen and the bag lift when the track is dry; it does not cover your car, your food or your journey to Abruzzo, and the figure is settled when the dates are.

Season, weather, and who it is wrong for

The office puts people up there between the middle of May and the middle of October and will not reserve it outside those dates. The track is not cleared, snow lies in the hollows above 1,300 meters into April, and the spring pipe freezes. In July and August the door reads 26 to 28 degrees by mid afternoon while the nights sit between nine and thirteen, so the stove gets lit in August more often than people expect. From about the twentieth of July cloud builds over the crest most afternoons, and roughly one day in three ends in two hours of thunder and hail, which is loud under a stone roof and then over. In September the build up is occasional rather than daily, and by the last week the dark arrives at eight. Rain is not the difficulty. Being four kilometers from a car in rain is the difficulty, and there is one room to sit in. This suits two people who are content with each other and can walk five hours without negotiating it. It does not suit anyone who wants a shop, a signal, a shower, or the option of changing the plan at lunchtime.