The satnav had been insisting for the last forty minutes that we were "arriving at destination" whilst simultaneously directing us up what I can only describe as a goat's idea of a joke. My partner, ever the optimist, kept saying "it must be just round this bend" for roughly the twelfth time when the hire car made a noise like a disappointed sigh and the fuel light flickered on. There we were, halfway up a mountain in Tyrol, surrounded by pine trees that looked like they had been growing since before manners were invented, and absolutely nowhere to turn round.

I had spotted a small wooden building with a hand-painted sign reading "Alm" and decided that beggars in overheated Volkswagens cannot be choosers. What followed was perhaps the most charming twenty minutes of my life, entirely because of the woman who emerged from what turned out to be a working dairy farm. Greta, as she introduced herself, must have been somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty, with hands like weathered leather and an accent so thick I initially thought she was speaking dialect on purpose to confuse outsiders. She took one look at our predicament, laughed until she had to lean on her doorframe, and produced a jerry can from somewhere behind a stack of milk churns that looked older than my grandmother.

"You English," she said, shaking her head as if this explained everything from Brexit to our poor navigational skills. "Always the small cars. Always the big mountains." She refused payment for the petrol, instead extracting a promise that we would return for proper coffee. I asked how she would know if we did not. She tapped her nose and said, "In Castello Tesino, everyone knows everything. You will see."

She was not wrong. The final approach to the property took us through a village where three separate people waved at our car with the familiarity of old friends, despite never having laid eyes on us before. An elderly gentleman with a walking stick that looked more like a wizard's staff stopped his amble entirely to watch us pass, offering a nod so solemn it felt like receiving a knighthood.

The Castello Tesino itself sits in that particular way old Austrian buildings have, where you cannot quite tell if it is modest or magnificent until you are standing right in front of it. Our host, a fellow called Manfred with a moustache that deserved its own postal code, met us on the gravel drive before I had even fully extracted myself from the driver's seat. He had apparently heard about us already. "The English with the empty tank," he announced, not unkindly. "Greta telephoned. She said you have honest faces but bad maps."

Manfred showed us round with the particular pride of someone who has spent years coaxing a building back to life. Every beam, every slightly uneven floorboard came with a story attached, usually involving some local character or other. The carpenter who had done the original restoration, he told us, was a man called Hubert who refused to use any power tools after 1987 following what Manfred referred to only as "the incident with the router and the bishop's visit." I did not press for details. Some village legends deserve their mystery.

That first evening, we walked down to the nearest village proper, a place called Tesino though nobody seemed to call it anything but "the village" with implicit capital letters. We found a small gasthof where the landlady, a sharp-eyed woman called Helga, took our order without writing anything down then recited it back perfectly to her husband through a kitchen hatch no bigger than a postbox. She asked where we were staying, and when I told her, she immediately wanted to know if Manfred had shown us "the room with the ghost." I said he had not. She looked deeply satisfied, as if this confirmed something she had long suspected about him.

By the time we wandered back up the lane to the Castello, the mountains had turned that particular blue-grey that makes them look like painted backdrops, and somewhere a cowbell was doing its slow, clanking thing. I stood there for a moment, breathing in air that tasted of pine and woodsmoke and something else I could not identify, and thought about how easily I could have spent that afternoon furious about the satnav, the car, the whole inconvenience of it. Instead, I had met Greta and her milk churns, received a nod from the wizard of the village lane, been assessed for my honest face by telephone, and learned of a ghost that may or may not exist depending on who was doing the telling.

Manfred had left a note on our door saying breakfast would be at eight and that the bread came from a bakery run by a man who only baked on days when his arthritis allowed, so "we hope for good joints, yes?" I found myself hoping for exactly that, not really for the bread, though I am sure it would be excellent, but for another morning of this particular rhythm, this way of being known before you have properly introduced yourself.

That is the thing about places like Castello Tesino, I think, as I sit here writing this with a glass of something local and a view of those impossibly patient mountains. You arrive thinking you are having a holiday in a building, in a landscape. What you actually get is a temporary membership in a whole web of people who have been here forever, who know each other's stories and will happily add you to the collection, provided you do not mind being laughed at first. I do not mind at all. In fact, I think I rather like being the English with the empty tank, the honest face, the bad maps. It feels like a beginning rather than an embarrassment, and I cannot remember the last time a wrong turn gave me that.