I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I confidently turned left at what I was absolutely certain was the correct junction, only to find myself twenty minutes later staring at a field of very judgmental-looking sheep. My partner, ever patient, simply unfolded the actual directions from his pocket and pointed out that I had in fact ignored the correct turn by a good three miles. "The sat nav's just a suggestion," I muttered, though the sheep seemed unconvinced by this defence.

We were bound for Fur, a tiny island in North Jutland connected to the mainland by a ferry so brief you barely have time to finish saying "did we remember the-" before you're already there. The house we'd booked sat somewhere on the island's western side, a traditional Danish summer place with weathered wood and that particular Scandinavian talent for making everything look effortlessly cosy. Finding it, however, required navigating a network of lanes that seemed to have been designed by someone who fundamentally distrusted straight lines.

The mishap proved oddly fortunate. Our wrong turn deposited us on a narrow track between two hedgerows, where we stumbled upon a small clearing with a bench overlooking Limfjord. No sign, no parking area, nothing to indicate it existed at all. We sat there with our emergency flask of coffee, watching a heron work the shallows, and I felt that particular satisfaction of the accidentally discovered. My partner, who had been tactfully silent about my navigational failure, finally said "nice detour" with only the faintest hint of irony.

Properly arrived at last, the house exceeded every hope. White-painted, red trim, with windows that caught the late afternoon light in that flat Danish way that makes everything look like a painting. But the real revelation came the following morning when, determined to explore properly, we set out with a borrowed map and promptly got lost again within half an hour.

Fur's interior is a maze of small roads and smaller paths, many unmarked, winding through farmland and sudden patches of wild growth. The island is famous for its moler cliffs, those extraordinary striped geological formations, but we found ourselves instead on a tractor track that ended at a tiny beach of smooth stones. A single wooden dinghy lay upturned beside a shed that appeared to have been abandoned decades ago. We stayed for an hour, collecting nothing, doing nothing, simply watching the water move.

Later that week we developed a deliberate habit of wrong turns. A supposed shortcut to the shop became an hour's wander through back lanes where we encountered an elderly man tending beehives who spoke no English but insisted we taste honeycomb straight from the frame, his gestures so emphatic that refusal seemed impossible. Another accidental path led to a small lake we never found again on subsequent attempts, its surface covered that morning with a mist so low and thick that the far shore simply didn't exist.

The ferry back to the mainland on our final morning felt almost intrusive, a return to the world of deliberate destinations. I thought about those sheep, the heron, the honeycomb, the lake that vanished. My navigational incompetence had become, against all expectation, the organising principle of a holiday I hadn't planned and couldn't repeat. Some places reward the lost, I decided. Fur is unquestionably one of them.