I should have known the holiday proper started the moment our sat-nav gave up somewhere near Bergerac. One minute we were cruising along with that smug confidence of people who had printed directions, the next we were threading down a lane barely wider than a baguette, my partner clutching the door handle and me pretending I had meant to turn there all along. The mishap, of course, was me reversing into a ditch to let a tractor pass. A very patient farmer watched from his cab as I performed a twelve-point turn that would have shamed a learner. I waved apologetically. He raised his cap and grinned. Welcome to rural Aquitaine.

By the time we found Saint Aubin de Cadelech, I had sweated through my shirt and developed a deep philosophical hatred of French road signage. But then the stone house appeared, tucked among walnut trees with that particular honey-coloured light you only seem to get in the Dordogne valley, and I forgave everything. Even the ditch.

We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person does after a wrong-turn odyssey: went for a wander with no destination in mind. This proved to be the making of the week. Within ten minutes of leaving the property, we took a path that looked promising and promptly got ourselves lost in the best possible way. The track petered out into woodland, then emerged unexpectedly at a clearing where an elderly woman was tending a vegetable patch the size of a football pitch. She spoke no English, we spoke barely any French, but she pressed warm tomatoes into our hands and pointed us toward what she called "le vieux pont." We never found her bridge. What we found instead was a tiny stone chapel, apparently abandoned, with wild roses climbing through its broken window. Someone had left fresh flowers on the step. I stood there feeling like an intruder who had stumbled into someone else's secret, which of course I had.

The following days became a deliberate exercise in purposeful wandering. We set off each morning with a bottle of water and the firm intention of getting lost. It never took long. One afternoon a wrong fork led us to a farm selling walnut oil from a barn with no sign, just an honesty box and a cat asleep on the counter. Another time we emerged from a copse onto a ridge with views across rolling countryside that made us both go quiet, the kind of silence that only happens when you have accidentally found exactly where you needed to be.

I kept thinking about that farmer watching my terrible reversing. There is something humbling about being so obviously out of your depth, about needing rescue from a situation of your own making. Getting lost became a sort of meditation on that. Each time we strayed from the obvious route, we found something that no guidebook had prepared us for: a spring where locals filled plastic bottles, a ruined dovecote we would never have noticed from the road, a field of sunflowers turned suddenly toward us like an audience.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking my phone for maps entirely. The sat-nav stayed in the glove box, sulking. We found our way back to the house each evening by instinct, or luck, or the general slope of the land toward the valley. I cannot tell you exactly where any of those places were. I could not find them again if you paid me. That is rather the point. Some discoveries only exist because you were not looking for them, because you took the wrong lane and had to reverse into a ditch and accept help with good grace. I arrived at Saint Aubin de Cadelech thinking I needed to know where I was going. I left understanding that sometimes the ditch is the destination, and the person waving from the tractor cab has already given you everything you came for.