I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong beach house for a solid ten minutes, much to the amusement of a chap called Henrik who was pruning roses three doors down. I'd been so pleased with myself for navigating the winding lanes of Mommark Strand without incident after the ferry from Bredstedt, only to discover I'd written the house number down backwards in my phone. Henrik eventually wandered over, secateurs in hand, and gently suggested I might have better luck four doors along. "Happens to the Germans all the time," he said, with what I suspect was deliberate diplomacy.

The actual cottage, when I found it, was everything the website promised - weatherboard cladding, a terrace that practically demanded a morning coffee, and that particular hush you only get when the Baltic is lapping somewhere nearby. But it was the people, not the property, that made the week.

Henrik, it transpired, was a retired ship's engineer who'd settled in Mommark twenty years prior after marrying a local woman called Birgit. He appeared at my terrace rail each morning with some fresh observation - the best angle for spotting porpoises, why Danish beach roses outperform English ones (something to do with salt tolerance and stubbornness, much like their cultivators), and his ongoing feud with a herring gull he'd named Knud after a former shipmate. "Knud the gull is more reliable than Knud the man," he told me solemnly. "Both steal my breakfast, but at least the gull is punctual."

Birgit herself emerged on my third day, bearing a plate of hindbaersnitter she'd baked because Henrik had mentioned the Englishman seemed "inadequately fed." She had the direct manner of someone who'd spent decades managing a man who talked to seabirds. She inspected my kitchen with the efficiency of a harbourmaster, pronounced my tea-making apparatus "sad," and presented me with a proper kettle she'd found at a flea market in Sonderborg. "Henrik says you are polite but lost," she said. "I say you are lost but polite. The order matters."

The local shop, a compact affair near the marina, was presided over by a woman called Lene who remembered everyone's coffee order and nobody's name. She called me "Sweden" for two days, then "Germany" for one, before settling on "the tea one" with evident satisfaction. We discussed the weather with the intensity of agriculturalists, though our only crop was conversation. She'd grown up in Copenhagen, fled to Als at nineteen after a disastrous romance, and claimed she'd only stayed because she'd failed to leave three separate times. "The ferry timetable defeats ambition," she said, ringing up my milk. "Also, the swimming here is honest. The water tells you immediately if you belong."

I met a fellow called Frede while failing to erect a beach windbreak with the competence of a man who'd clearly never been a Scout. He was seventy-ish, wore a cap that had seen actual naval service, and supervised my incompetence without intervening for a full fifteen minutes before taking pity. "My grandson is similarly useless," he said, by way of introduction, then demonstrated the proper technique with the economical movements of someone who'd spent a life making do. He lived in a house his grandfather had built, had never travelled beyond Hamburg, and spoke of Mommark Strand with the particularity of a curator. "That rock there," he'd say, pointing, "my mother sat on it in 1953 and decided to marry my father. Bad decision, good rock."

By my final evening, sitting on that terrace with Henrik's borrowed binoculars and Birgit's kettle nearby, I realised something about these encounters. I'd arrived thinking of a beach holiday as escape, as privacy, as the absence of others. Instead I'd found myself collected, slightly chided, generously fed, and renamed by people who'd simply decided I was part of their landscape now. Lene had started setting aside a particular cheese she thought I'd like. Frede had left a proper windbreak outside my door with a note reading "for the useless." Even Knud the gull had begun visiting regularly, though I suspect that was mostly about the pastries.

I left the key with Birgit, who inspected it for cleanliness with the same harbourmaster's eye she'd applied to my kitchen, then surprised me with a hug that suggested I'd passed some unspoken examination. "Come back when you've learned to make tea properly," she said. Henrik waved from his roses. Lene called out something about the weather turning. And I drove to the ferry feeling less like a tourist who'd stayed somewhere, and more like someone who'd been briefly, oddly, adopted by a stretch of Danish coast that collects strays with the same casual efficiency it collects smooth stones from the Baltic.