The ferry from Ystad was meant to be the straightforward bit. I'd checked the timetable three times, packed the car with military precision, and even remembered to switch my headlights to European mode. What I had not done, in my smug state of preparedness, was actually check which port on Bornholm we were sailing into. I had simply assumed Ronne, because that is where the big boats go. So when we docked at Ronne and I smugly followed my sat nav for twenty minutes towards Snogebak Strand, I felt rather pleased with myself. It was only when the voice announced "you have reached your destination" in the middle of a potato field that I realised my error. The property was near Snogebak village, yes, but the other Snogebak, the one by the ferry terminal at Ronne. I had driven in a complete circle, essentially chasing my own tail across the Danish countryside, and arrived back where I started with half a tank of petrol and significantly less dignity.

My partner found this hilarious for approximately four minutes, which was roughly how long it took me to find the actual turning down a narrow lane between two whitewashed houses. The cottage sat tucked behind a low stone wall, weathered to that particular soft grey you only seem to get on Bornholm. The garden was slightly overgrown in the way that suggests the owner trusts nature more than they trust a strimmer. I rather liked that.

We dumped our bags with the enthusiasm of people who have spent six hours in transit and immediately set off on what was meant to be a quick stroll to orient ourselves. The beach at Snogebak proper was visible from the lane, a curve of pale sand with the Baltic stretching beyond it, but we turned the wrong way at a fork and found ourselves walking through a patch of woodland that grew increasingly dense and increasingly not-on-the-map. The path narrowed, then became two parallel ruts, then became something that might have been a badger trail. We pressed on with the stubbornness of the slightly lost, and emerged suddenly onto a small cove I have never seen mentioned in any guidebook.

It was nothing dramatic, perhaps forty metres of shingle sheltered by low cliffs. An old rowing boat lay upturned, its paint peeling in satisfying layers of blue and white. Someone had built a fire pit from gathered stones, and the ash inside was cold but recent. We sat on a flat rock and watched a cormorant drying its wings on a nearby skerry. My partner observed that this was probably someone's secret place, and I felt a brief flicker of guilt for intruding. But the footprints in the shingle suggested others had found it too, perhaps by similar accident.

The next morning, determined to repeat our success, we set out deliberately to get lost. This is harder than it sounds on an island with excellent mobile coverage. We left phones behind and took only a paper map, which I had folded incorrectly so that the eastern half was largely obscured. Within an hour we were wandering through farmland south of Snogebak, following a track between fields of rye that rose well above head height. The sound of the sea had vanished entirely, replaced by the dry rustling of grain and the occasional distant bark of a farm dog.

At a five-way junction of equally unpromising tracks, we chose the one with the most nettles and found ourselves in a small hamlet of perhaps six houses, centred on a pond where two elderly men sat fishing with the patience of people who had nowhere else to be. One nodded as we passed. We did not speak enough Danish to ask where we were, and they did not seem inclined to volunteer it. The village had no name on any sign we could see. I later spent an embarrassing amount of time on satellite maps trying to identify it, and failed. It remains, in my mind, simply the place with the pond and the nodding fisherman.

Our final accidental discovery came on the last evening, when a wrong turn returning from the supermarket at Ronne led us down a road that ended abruptly at a small harbour. Not the working harbour of Ronne itself, but a private affair, perhaps for a dozen boats, with a single shed where someone was repairing nets in the doorway. The light was that particular Scandinavian gold that lasts for hours in late summer, and the water in the harbour was utterly still, reflecting masts and clouds with the precision of a mirror. We stayed until the mosquitoes found us, which on Bornholm does not take long.

I have been on holidays where every moment was optimised, every restaurant researched, every viewpoint pre-selected from Instagram. This was not one of them. Bornholm rewarded our incompetence with places we could not have found deliberately, and I am not entirely sure I would want to find them again. Some discoveries, I think, only keep their charm because you cannot return on purpose.