I have to admit, my journey to Steffeshausen began with the kind of comedy of errors that I now realise was probably inevitable. I'd decided to drive from Calais, smugly thinking I could handle Belgian motorways after a full English at Dover. Three hours later, I was circling Liege's ring road for the fourth time, having missed the same exit twice, with my phone insistently telling me to "turn around when possible" in that judgmental tone it has. The mishap, though, came when I finally stopped for petrol just outside the city. I confidently strode up to the kiosk, announced "Steffeshausen, s'il vous plait" with the misplaced confidence of someone who got a B in GCSE French, and was met with a blank stare. The attendant, a wiry chap called Jean-Pierre with nicotine-stained fingers and kind eyes, slowly shook his head. "C'est Wallonie, monsieur. On parle wallon ici, ou francais. Mais votre accent..." He trailed off, chuckling to himself. I'd been speaking to a Belgian in French with an English accent so plummy it probably sounded like I was doing a bad impression of the Queen. He gave me directions in a mixture of French and theatrical pointing, and I left with my dignity in tatters but a hand-drawn map on a receipt.

The property itself sits in the rolling hills just beyond Liege proper, a converted farmhouse with the kind of solid, unpretentious character that immediately puts you at ease. My first evening, I wandered down to the village pub, a low-beamed place called Le Cheval Blanc, mostly because I was starving and my self-catering skills extend to burning pasta. The landlord, Marcel, must be seventy if he's a day, with a magnificent white moustache that he strokes constantly, as though checking it's still there. He took one look at me, decided I was English before I opened my mouth, and announced to the room at large that "les Anglais sont arrives, cachez les frites." The three regulars at the bar didn't even look up from their beers, which I took as a good sign.

I ended up eating a carbonnade flamande that Marcel's wife, Yvette, had apparently been simmering since Tuesday. She emerged from the kitchen periodically to criticise his pouring technique or to tell me, with complete seriousness, that I held my fork "like a farmer." Marcel simply rolled his eyes and refilled my beer. "Forty-three years," he said, though whether this referred to their marriage or how long she'd been correcting him, he didn't specify.

The next morning, determined to redeem myself linguistically, I attempted to buy bread at the village boulangerie. The woman behind the counter, Madame Dumont, had the sharp features and sharper manner of someone who has seen every kind of tourist foolishness and committed most of it to memory. I asked for "deux baguettes" with what I thought was decent pronunciation. She looked at me over her glasses. "You want two? For one person? You are greedy, or you have a secret wife?" I stammered something about lunch. "Lunch, he says. In Belgium we have breakfast, then we work, then we have dinner. This 'lunch' is for soft people." She wrapped my bread with exaggerated care, as though handling evidence. "You are staying at the old farm? The one with the Englishwoman last year who cried about the spiders?" I confirmed this was the property. She nodded sagely. "Good. You seem tougher. But not much."

By my third day, I'd become something of a fixture at Le Cheval Blanc, which I suspect had less to do with my charm and more to do with Marcel's policy of never letting a glass stay empty. A chap called Philippe started joining me, a retired railway worker with hands like shovels and a laugh that started somewhere in his boots and worked its way up. He spoke no English, I spoke barely any French, and yet we spent an entire evening discussing, as far as I could tell, the comparative merits of Liege's football team versus its cycling club. At one point he became so animated about a particular cyclist from the 1980s that he knocked his own drink over, then spent five minutes apologising to the table. Marcel watched this with the weary satisfaction of a man whose evening's entertainment had just arrived free of charge.

What struck me, and what I kept returning to during quiet moments on the farmhouse terrace with a beer and a book I wasn't really reading, was how these small interactions had become the whole point. I'd come for the Ardennes scenery, the promise of hiking trails and historic Liege, and I'd done precious little of either. Instead, I'd collected fragments of other people's lives: Yvette's disapproval, Jean-Pierre's patient map-drawing, Philippe's incomprehensible sporting passions. There was something gently humbling about being the outsider who couldn't quite get the language right, who held his fork wrong and ate at the wrong times, and yet was tolerated with what I can only describe as Belgian pragmatism. They weren't performing hospitality for tourists; they were simply being themselves, and I was lucky enough to be in the room.

On my final evening, Marcel poured me a jenever on the house, which Yvette immediately declared would "finish the Englishman." I sipped it carefully, feeling the burn, and Marcel patted my shoulder with what might have been sympathy or might have been preparation for catching me. "You come back," he said. It wasn't a question. I said I would, and realised I actually meant it. Not for the farmhouse, lovely as it was, nor even for the hills I'd barely walked. For the people who'd let me bumble through their language and their routines, who'd found me amusing without being cruel about it, who'd made a stranger feel briefly like he belonged somewhere specific, somewhere small and stubborn and entirely itself.

I drove back to Calais the long way, deliberately, getting lost again on purpose, because suddenly the getting lost felt like the whole point.