I have never been so grateful for a pair of wellies in my entire life.

The drive down to Bannalec from Roscoff had been textbook Brittany so far: green fields, the odd granite farmhouse, and enough drizzle to make you wonder if the windscreen wipers were about to stage a walkout. My partner, ever the optimist, had packed sunglasses. I had packed three types of waterproof. This would prove to be the single wisest decision of my entire holiday.

We found the cottage down a narrow lane that Google Maps clearly considered more of a suggestion than a fact. The sat nav gave up entirely somewhere near a field of very judgmental-looking cows. I was navigating using a screenshot on my phone, which I then dropped down the side of the passenger seat while trying to zoom in. We arrived twenty minutes late, slightly hysterical, with my phone still wedged beneath the seat and me convinced we would be locked out forever in the Breton wilderness.

The owners, a lovely couple from Quimper, were far more forgiving than we deserved. They showed us round the stone cottage with its beamed ceilings and that particular smell of old wood and distant sea air that immediately makes you want to curl up with a book you will never actually finish. I was busy admiring the fireplace and imagining myself as a sophisticated rural French person when I stepped out into the garden and straight into what I can only describe as a puddle with ambitions. My canvas shoes, chosen specifically for their "casual village aesthetic," were immediately saturated. My partner did not laugh. Much.

We had planned, rather grandly, to spend our first afternoon on a proper hike. I had read about a circular walk through the Bois du Nevet, just a few miles from the cottage, and had visions of striding through sun-dappled woodland like someone in an outdoor clothing advert. The reality was somewhat different. The rain, which had been merely persistent, escalated to what the Met Office would diplomatically call "heavy and prolonged." We stood in the cottage doorway, me in my one remaining dry pair of socks, watching the garden path transform into a small river.

"Shall we just go to the boulangerie instead?" my partner suggested.

I wanted to be the sort of person who said no, who embraced the elements, who had that admirable British stoicism about weather. Instead I said yes immediately, and we drove the embarrassingly short distance to the centre of Bannalec for croissants and coffee that we ate in the car while the rain performed what I can only describe as a drum solo on the roof.

The next morning brought what I now understand to be classic Breton conditions: not raining precisely, but heavily implying that it might. We set off anyway, properly booted this time, for the walk we had abandoned. The Bois du Nevet was beautiful in that slightly menacing way that forests are when the sky is the colour of a bruise. The paths were muddy, the streams were swollen, and I spent a good portion of the walk staring at my feet to avoid falling into what I had learned to recognise as "ambitious puddles."

We reached a small clearing where the trees opened up to reveal the Aulne river, broad and brown and moving with surprising purpose. I stood there, slightly out of breath, aware that my waterproof was no longer living up to its name in several key areas, and felt something unexpected. Not the profound communion with nature I had imagined, exactly, but a kind of muddy contentment. The sort of feeling you get when you have stopped fighting something and started, however reluctantly, to accept it.

The rain began again in earnest on the walk back. We were too far from the car to turn round, too committed to pretend we had ever had any other plan. My partner started singing something from Les Miserables, very badly. I joined in, even more badly. Two damp British people, squelching through a Breton forest, bellowing about revolution. I cannot imagine what the local wildlife made of us.

By the time we reached the cottage, we were both soaked through in ways that defied the laws of physics. My "waterproof" trousers had surrendered at the seams. My partner's allegedly breathable jacket had apparently decided to keep all the moisture in, like a greenhouse for human misery. We stood in the kitchen, dripping onto the flagstones, and laughed until it hurt.

That evening, we built a fire in the stone fireplace and dried our clothes on every available surface. The cottage looked like a laundry explosion in a cave. We drank cider, proper Breton cider from a local producer my partner had chatted up in the supermarket, and ate galettes we had picked up from a creperie in Quimper. The rain battered the windows with what felt like personal animosity.

The following days brought variations on this theme. A walk to the nearby village of Saint-Thurien was abandoned when the path became indistinguishable from a stream. An attempted coastal walk near Concarneau was derailed by fog so thick I genuinely lost sight of my own feet. We retreated to a harbour-side cafe and ate moules-frites while watching fishing boats materialise and disappear like ghosts.

I had packed hiking boots, ordnance survey maps, that sort of earnest energy that comes from reading too many articles about "the best walks in Brittany." What I had not packed was flexibility, the willingness to let a holiday become something other than what I had planned. The weather forced that upon me, relentlessly, wetly, until I finally stopped resisting.

Our final morning brought the only genuinely clear day of the week. We walked to the Aulne again, the same path now transformed by sunlight into something almost unrecognisably pleasant. The river glittered. The trees looked green rather than merely dark. I took photographs that looked like postcards and felt, oddly, slightly disappointed. This was the walk I had wanted, and it was lovely, but it was not the walk I would remember.

What I will remember is the squelch of mud, the unexpected warmth of a fire after hours of damp misery, the terrible singing, the way we learned to read the sky and adjust our ambitions accordingly. I will remember that I am not, in fact, the sort of person who strides through sun-dappled forests like an advert. I am the sort of person who falls into puddles, who packs three waterproofs and still gets wet, who eventually learns to find the joy in that.

We left the wellies by the door when we departed, too battered to bring home, too beloved to throw away. The owners will find them, I imagine, and wonder what on earth we did to them. I hope they know we were grateful.