I'd driven across Jutland with the kind of misplaced confidence that only a British person armed with a sat nav and a packet of wine gums can muster. The plan was simple: reach Skaven Strand by mid-afternoon, stretch my legs with a brisk coastal walk, then settle into the holiday home with a cup of tea and a smug sense of Scandinavian organisation. What actually happened was that I missed the turning twice, once because a tractor the size of a bungalow was blocking my view, and once because I was too busy arguing with the automated voice about whether "Skaven" rhymes with "craven" or "graven." It rhymes with neither, I later discovered, much to my embarrassment at the local supermarket.

The property itself sits in that satisfyingly sparse West Jutland landscape where the horizon seems to have been stretched by someone overzealous with Photoshop. Low dunes, marram grass doing its best impression of a bad hair day, and the North Sea lurking in the distance like a relative who's arrived early for Christmas. The house was one of those practical Danish numbers, all clean lines and sensible windows, the sort of place that makes you feel slightly ashamed of your own cluttered existence back home.

I dumped my bags with the intention of heading straight out. The weather app, which I now regard with the same scepticism I reserve for political promises, had shown a friendly little sun icon. What greeted me was a wind that felt personally offended by my presence. Still, I'm British. Wind is practically our national sport. I layered up like a anxious onion and set off toward the beach.

The path from Skaven Strand down to the water is proper walking country. Firm sand in places, then suddenly that deceptive stuff that looks solid until you're ankle-deep and questioning every life choice that brought you to this particular patch of North Sea coastline. I made it perhaps forty minutes along the shore before the first proper squall hit. Not rain, exactly. More like the sea deciding to experiment with airborne delivery. I turned back, laughing despite myself, already soaked in that particular way that makes you feel oddly alive and faintly ridiculous.

The next morning I woke to grey stillness. No wind, no rain, just that heavy Scandinavian light that makes everything look like a film set. I set off again, this time inland through the coastal meadows behind the strand. There's a network of paths there, nothing dramatic, just the honest trudge of grassland and the occasional surprised hare. I walked for hours, properly lost in that meditative way that walking does, until I realised I'd done a full loop and was approaching the house from entirely the wrong direction.

Day three brought the kind of rain that architects presumably have in mind when they design Danish holiday homes. I stood at the window with my tea, watching it come down in sheets, and felt that peculiar British mixture of disappointment and relief. The relief, I think, came from permission granted. One cannot walk in this. One must simply be. I spent the morning reading in the window seat, watching the weather perform its violent theatre, feeling smug about the solid Danish construction that kept it all outside.

Of course I walked anyway. The afternoon cleared to that luminous post-storm brightness that makes West Jutland briefly tropical in feeling, if not in temperature. I went south this time, toward the mouth of the Skaven A, where the little river meets the sea in a confusion of sandbars and shifting water. My boots squelched satisfyingly. My cheeks stung. I was, by any objective measure, uncomfortable and slightly miserable and absolutely content.

That's the thing about walking in weather that refuses to cooperate. It strips away the performance of holiday-making, the pressure to be constantly delighted. You're simply there, moving through landscape that doesn't care about your itinerary, becoming gradually more honest with yourself about why you came. I came, I suppose, to feel small in the right way. The North Sea and the Jutland wind were generous in that regard.

By my final morning I'd developed a ritual. Coffee, then straight out regardless of what the sky was threatening. The last walk was the best, a grey dawn along empty beach, the wind having exhausted itself overnight, everything held in that suspended moment before the day decides what it wants to be. I found a piece of driftwood shaped roughly like the British Isles and carried it home, then laughed at myself for the sentimentality and left it on the windowsill anyway.

Driving back, wine gums depleted, sat nav finally understood, I kept thinking about that first squall. How I'd cursed and laughed and kept walking. How the weather had done what weather does, and I'd done what I do, and somehow that small collision had become the whole point.