I'd driven three hours from Aarhus, smugly certain I'd mastered Danish rural navigation, when my phone decided to stage a small rebellion. One moment I was following a sensible route to the Dragsmur; the next, Google Maps had me convinced I should turn onto what can only be described as a glorified tractor path between two fields of particularly judgmental-looking sheep. I crawled along for ten minutes, my hire car making unhappy scraping noises, before realising I'd followed the map straight to someone's private farmhouse. A very patient Dane in wellies pointed me back toward Grenaa with the kind of smile that suggested this happened weekly.

Properly chastened, I finally found the turning. The Dragsmur sits down a narrow lane near the village of Fjellerup, and my first glimpse through the trees was of weathered timber and a mossy roof that looked like it had been growing there since before Denmark had proper roads. It's a proper half-timbered place, the sort that makes you feel immediately that you've stumbled into someone's well-kept secret rather than a holiday let.

The key was in a lockbox, which of course I immediately fumbled, dropping it into a patch of stinging nettles that I hadn't noticed. There I was, hopping about and muttering apologies to no one in particular, when I heard a voice from the neighbouring hedge. An elderly chap with secateurs emerged, entirely unfazed, and simply handed me a garden fork to fish the box out. "You're the English," he said, not as a question. "Last one did the same." I chose to find this charming rather than worrying about my predictability.

Inside, the place smelled of pine and something else I couldn't place, something old and clean. The ceilings are low enough that I, at a thoroughly average five-foot-ten, felt mildly tall for the first time in my life. I spent a good ten minutes just standing in the kitchen, running my hand along the worn wooden counter and wondering how many people had made morning coffee there, staring out at the same garden going slowly wild in that deliberate Danish way.

I hadn't planned to get lost again. Honestly, I hadn't. But after unpacking, I went for what I intended as a brief wander down to the coast, following a path that started promisingly enough behind the property. Within twenty minutes, the proper trail had dissolved into something far more interesting, a narrow track through low scrub and sandy soil that I later learned was old heathland, the kind that once covered far more of Djursland before farming took hold.

The path forked, and forked again, and I made choices with the confident randomness of someone who fundamentally believes all paths lead somewhere interesting. They don't, of course, but these ones did. I emerged onto a small cove I'd never have found deliberately, a pocket of beach between low cliffs where someone had once built a rough shelter from driftwood, now half-collapsed and home to a family of gulls who were not pleased by my arrival. I sat on a rock for half an hour, watching the Kattegat do its grey-green shimmering thing, feeling that particular satisfaction of having earned a view through sheer incompetence.

Walking back, I took a different wrong turn and found a tiny cemetery, barely a dozen stones, hidden in a stand of birch trees. The inscriptions were worn to near-illegibility, but one from 1847 was still readable, a fisherman who'd apparently lived to eighty-three, which struck me as either remarkable luck or a very conservative estimate. I stood there feeling the weight of that, the accidental nature of finding it, the way holidays work best when they slip their leash.

By the time I stumbled back to the Dragsmur, the light was going that particular soft gold you get in late Danish summer, and my neighbour with the secateurs was watering his tomatoes. He didn't ask where I'd been. He simply nodded, as if wrong turns were the whole point of being there, and perhaps they are.