I have never been so grateful to see a wooden beach hut in my life. Three hours after leaving Aarhus Airport, my partner and I finally rolled up to Skovgarde Strand, having taken what I can only describe as the scenic route through East Jutland. By scenic route, I mean we got spectacularly lost somewhere near Ebeltoft after I confidently declared I did not need sat nav because "the coast is literally right there, how hard can it be?" Reader, it was hard. We ended up down a farm track, got chased by an extremely committed goose, and arrived at our holiday home with me still shaking with laughter and slightly covered in mud.

But stepping out of the car in late November, everything else fell away. The air had that particular Danish winter quality to it, sharp and clean and somehow full of salt even though the Kattegat was still hidden behind a line of bare trees. Our little wooden house sat among others just like it, all painted in that classic muted red, huddled together as if for warmth against the grey sky. I remember thinking they looked almost apologetic about the season, these summer places caught out by the turning of the year.

The key was in a lockbox, which of course I immediately fumbled with frozen fingers. My partner stood there holding two bags and a packet of remoulade we had panic-bought at a petrol station, watching me fail to operate a four-digit code in what I considered a very dignified manner. When the door finally swung open, the smell hit us first. That unmistakable closed-up wooden cabin scent, part pine, part old beach towels, part something else I could never quite identify. In summer, I imagine people throw open every window and let the Baltic breeze scour it clean. Not in late November. We were sealed in with forty years of Danish holiday memories, and I found something oddly comforting about that.

The light was already fading at half past three, which took some adjusting to. I kept reaching for sunglasses out of habit, then feeling foolish. The rooms grew dim and amber as afternoon slipped towards evening, and we found ourselves moving slower, matching our pace to the season. There was no rushing to the beach, no ambitious hiking plans. Just the quiet business of settling in, of finding where the previous guests had left candles and matches, of working out which radiators actually functioned and which were decorative suggestions.

I made tea with water that tasted slightly of the tank, and we sat at the small table watching the last colour drain from the sky through windows that needed a clean. In summer, I suppose, you would barely be indoors at this hour. You would be grilling, swimming, walking the shoreline until ten at night with the sun still hovering. We had darkness, and the distant sound of waves we were too tired to go see, and the particular intimacy of a small space when the world outside has drawn in close and cold.

That first evening, I felt the season pressing against the walls like a living thing. It demanded a different kind of holiday, slower and more inward. I resented it slightly at first, if I am honest. I had wanted long walks and that bracing Scandinavian outdoorsiness you read about. Instead I got early nights and condensation on single-glazed windows, and the strange pleasure of wearing two jumpers indoors while reading a paperback I found on a shelf.

By morning, something had shifted. The grey light came late and stayed soft, and when I finally walked down to the water's edge, the beach was empty in a way that felt like a gift rather than a deprivation. The cold had driven everyone else away, and I stood there with my hands buried in borrowed gloves, watching a lone gull battle the wind, understanding finally that this was the experience. Not despite the season, but because of it. The enforced quiet, the shortened days, the way everything asked you to notice smaller things.

We stayed a week. I never did learn to love the four o'clock darkness, but I learned to expect it, to build the fire early and lean into the rhythm of it. That first goose-chased, mud-splattered arrival feels like months ago now, though it was only last month. I think about that cabin sometimes, out there in the winter quiet, waiting for summer people who will never quite understand what it feels like to need it as we needed it, in the cold and the dark and the beautiful, difficult hush of a Danish winter by the sea.