I should have known the holiday proper had begun when the sat-nav tried to send us down what looked like a goat's driveway somewhere north of Cahors. My partner, ever the optimist, insisted it was a shortcut. Ten minutes later we were reversing past a very unimpressed-looking donkey, the boot of our Renault flapping open because I'd forgotten to shut it properly after our sandwich stop at Limoges services. A baguette escaped. The donkey ate it. I choose to believe it enjoyed the ham and butter.

We found the proper road eventually, winding through the Lot valley as the light turned that particular honey colour you only seem to get in south-west France. Prayssac itself appeared around a bend like someone had left a postcard propped against the hills - stone houses, terracotta roofs, a tabac with its awning flapping in the warm breeze. The sort of place where you immediately feel overdressed in anything that isn't at least five years old and slightly stained.

The property, when we finally located it down a lane that definitely wasn't on any map I'd studied, turned out to be one of those converted stone farmhouses that manages to look both substantial and slightly ramshackle. The key was exactly where the owner said - under a terracotta pot beside a lavender bush that had gone feral and was attempting to colonise the neighbouring wall. I spent a good five minutes wrestling with the front door while my partner investigated a lizard on the gatepost. The lizard won his full attention. The door won mine, until I realised I'd been pushing when I should have been pulling. A promising start.

Inside, the place had that particular stillness of somewhere that's been waiting for you. Stone floors, wooden beams thick enough to hang a hammock from, a kitchen that smelled faintly of garlic and previous summers. I immediately opened the wrong cupboard looking for glasses and found instead an impressive collection of jam jars, each labelled in handwriting that suggested a previous guest had been very serious about their apricot preserves. We never did find out who made them.

The mishap with the door set the tone for what became our accidental method of discovery. That first evening, determined to find a bakery for morning croissants, we set off on foot and promptly took the wrong turning out of the lane. What should have been a ten-minute stroll became an hour's meander through countryside that grew increasingly unfamiliar and increasingly lovely. We found a chapel, locked and silent, with a notice board announcing a fete from three years previous. We found a stream where someone had placed a single wooden chair, facing the water, for no reason we could determine. We found a vineyard where an elderly chap waved us over and, despite our dreadful French, pressed glasses of something pink and excellent into our hands.

By the time we stumbled back to the house, stars properly out, we'd forgotten entirely about croissants. We had bread from a machine at a garage we'd passed, and cheese from a farm that hadn't looked like it sold anything until we knocked and a woman appeared with a wheel of something local and pungent.

The next morning, deliberately this time, we set out to get lost again. It became our thing. The official walking routes stayed in their folder, unopened. Instead we followed lanes that narrowed to tracks, tracks that became paths between dry stone walls, paths that ended at sudden viewpoints over the Lot valley where we'd stand, slightly breathless, wondering how we'd arrived somewhere so quietly spectacular without the slightest planning.

One afternoon, chasing the sound of bells, we found a small herd of sheep being moved between pastures by a shepherd who looked like he'd stepped from another century. He pointed us toward a spring we'd never have found otherwise, water rising clear from the limestone into a stone basin where someone had left a tin cup. The water tasted of minerals and something else, something I can only describe as the particular flavour of being exactly where you hadn't meant to be.

The sat-nav stayed in the glove box after that first day. The boot, I'm pleased to report, remained shut. And somewhere near Prayssac, I suspect, there's still a donkey with a taste for French ham sandwiches, living its best life entirely off the beaten track.