I should never have trusted the sat nav. There I was, bouncing down what I firmly believe was a tractor path masquerading as a road, convinced I'd found a shortcut to our cottage on Hjarbaek Fjord. My partner, ever the optimist, kept saying "it looks right on the map" right up until we scraped the underside of the hire car on a rock the size of a small dog. We reversed three miles back to civilisation, me sweating, him laughing, both of us pretending we weren't forty minutes late to meet the key holder.

Jens was waiting on his bicycle when we finally arrived, looking remarkably cheerful for a man who'd been kept kicking his heels in a fjord-side breeze. He must be seventy, wiry as old rope, with eyebrows that seemed to hold independent conversations with each other. Before I'd finished apologising, he'd waved it off and started telling me about the German couple last month who'd driven straight into the marina car park and couldn't reverse out. "You are amateur," he declared, with what I choose to believe was affection. "Come, I show you the boiler. Very important. Very Danish."

The cottage itself sat low and yellow-painted, huddled against the wind like it was sharing a joke with the reeds. Jens talked me through the heating system with the solemnity of a man handing down sacred knowledge, then pointed at the fjord through the kitchen window and said, "Good swimming. Cold. Makes you Danish, or dead. Sometimes both."

He'd barely cycled off before our neighbour appeared. Lene, sixty-ish, perpetually in wellingtons, carrying a Tupperware of something she called "traditional welcome" but which turned out to be pickled herring and a dense rye bread that could double as building material. She stayed for two hours. I learned about her divorced husband's new boat, her daughter's disappointing boyfriend in Aalborg, and her strong opinions about Swedish holidaymakers. "They bring their own meatballs," she whispered, as if confessing a murder. "What is point? We have meatballs. Better meatballs."

The next morning I attempted to buy groceries in Hjarbaek village, population small enough that everyone knows when you've scraped your car. At the little harbour shop, a man called Preben took one look at me and said, "You are the fjord cottage. The road people." News travels through limestone and saltwater here, apparently. He refused my attempt to buy milk until he'd walked me through his entire theory about why British people misunderstand Danish hygge. "It is not candles," he insisted, packing my eggs with surgical precision. "It is not blankets. It is accepting things are a bit rubbish sometimes, and being fine with it." I thought about our sat nav disaster and told him that actually, we might understand it better than he thought.

That evening, walking the stony shore as the light went flat and silver over Limfjorden, I found myself talking to a woman called Gitte who was throwing a tennis ball for a dog with more enthusiasm than sense. She'd grown up in one of the white wooden houses further along, left for Copenhagen for thirty years, came back when the city started feeling like "a very long queue." We stood there as her dog swam in enthusiastic circles, and she told me about how the fjord changes colour twelve times a day, how you can tell the season by which birds argue on the mudflats, how her mother still makes her feel twelve years old every time she visits. "This place," she said, chucking the ball again, "it doesn't care if you're interesting. That's the relief of it."

I thought about that later, sitting in the cottage with the heating Jens had blessed, eating Lene's indestructible bread, listening to nothing much at all. I'd arrived chasing a shortcut, embarrassed by my own incompetence, expecting to feel like a tourist. Instead, I'd stumbled into something rarer: people who treated my awkwardness as completely ordinary, who had time to tell me their grievances and their weather observations and their small, stubborn loves for this quiet edge of Denmark.

The sat nav never did work properly for the rest of the week. I took to getting deliberately lost, finding new lanes to scrape the car on, new locals to confess my failures to. They never seemed surprised to see me. Perhaps that's the real Danish magic, I thought. Not the candles, not the blankets. Just the calm assumption that you're already enough of a mess to belong.