I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my Citroen stuck in a hedge three minutes from the property. Not even a dramatic hedge, just a rather apologetic one outside a farmhouse where an elderly chap in blue overalls was watching from his gate with the patient expression of someone who has seen many English drivers come to grief on narrow Norman lanes.

"Encore un," he called out, not unkindly, as I emerged red-faced from the driver's side. This was Bernard, as I would later learn, and he would become something of a fixture over the week. He produced a tractor from somewhere, tugged me free with the air of a man performing a weekly chore, and refused payment with a wave so dismissive it bordered on theatrical. "You will come for cider," he announced. It was not a question.

The Appeville itself, when I finally reached it, was a handsome stone longhouse with the slightly battered dignity of a building that has seen centuries of Norman weather and remained politely unimpressed. Madame Leclercq, who managed the property with the brisk efficiency of a retired headmistress, was waiting on the doorstep with a key and an expression that suggested she had witnessed my hedge incident from her upstairs window.

"The satnav, it is not your friend here," she observed, handing me a folder of local information with the gravity of someone passing state secrets. "I have put the real directions inside. The ones that mention the oak tree with the bench, and the place where the road pretends to be a driveway." She said this without apparent humour, though her eyes suggested otherwise.

I had barely unpacked when there was a knock at the door. A round man in his sixties introduced himself as Didier from the neighbouring farm, bearing a jar of something yellow and unidentifiable. "My wife's confiture," he explained, though the label in his wife's careful handwriting clearly read "Miel." I did not correct him. He stayed for forty minutes, explaining the proper method for judging when apples are ready for harvesting, a subject on which he held passionate and contradictory views depending on which sentence you listened to.

The village itself, Appeville-Annebault proper, revealed its characters slowly. At the boulangerie, a woman named Colette served me my morning pain with running commentary on the weather, my pronunciation, and the previous customer's questionable choice in lottery numbers. "He plays the same numbers since 1987," she confided, handing me my change with the precision of a casino croupier. "His wife left him in 1989. There is perhaps a connection."

By the third day, I found myself recruited into Bernard's morning routine at the cafe-tabac, where a group of retired gentlemen held court over petits noirs and increasingly improbable claims about local history. A man named Marcel insisted the church tower was built by his great-great-grandfather single-handedly, a claim Bernard disputed with the weary patience of someone who had heard it weekly for thirty years. "Your great-great-grandfather could not build a wall straight," Bernard observed, stirring his coffee with deliberate slowness. "I have seen his wall. It leans."

What struck me, sitting there with my inadequate French and their patient corrections, was how these encounters had become the holiday rather than merely accompanying it. The property itself was comfortable, the countryside appropriately picturesque, but it was the sheer particularity of the people that made the place feel inhabited rather than merely visited. Madame Leclercq's carefully annotated folder of "real directions." Didier's honey that he would not admit was honey. Colette's running soap opera of village life served up with every baguette.

On my final morning, Bernard appeared at the gate as I loaded the car. He pressed a bottle of his own cider into my hands, still saying nothing about payment for the tractor rescue. "You did not hit my hedge so badly," he conceded, which I understood to be high praise. "Next time, perhaps you take the road that pretends to be a driveway."

I promised I would, though we both knew I would need Madame Leclercq's annotated map to find it.