I have never been so grateful for a thermos of tea in my life. There we were, my partner and I, crawling up the A16 in our ageing hatchback at the tail end of a Picardy November, convinced we had allowed plenty of time for the journey from Calais. The French motorways had other ideas. A lorry had shed its load of beetroot somewhere near Abbeville, and we sat stationary for the best part of an hour, watching the light leak out of the afternoon like water from a cracked bucket.

By the time we reached Chantilly, proper darkness had fallen. This was my first mistake. I had insisted we did not need the sat nav, that my phone would suffice. My second mistake was not downloading the offline map. My third, and perhaps most glorious, was driving straight past the turning for our holiday cottage and carrying on for nearly two miles before realising the road was becoming increasingly rural and the houses increasingly sparse. We turned around in a farm entrance, scattering a small flock of confused-looking chickens, and crawled back the way we had come with the sort of shame that only lost British tourists can truly know.

The cottage sat at the end of a gravel track, half-hidden behind a stand of bare horse chestnuts. November had stripped them of everything but their most stubborn leaves, and these rattled against the headlights as we finally crunched to a halt. I stepped out into air that felt properly cold, the sort of cold that catches at your throat and makes you aware of your own breathing. The smell hit me immediately: woodsmoke, damp earth, something faintly fungal from the surrounding woodland. It was not unpleasant. It was simply the smell of a French country winter settling in for the duration.

Our host had left the key under a terracotta pot by the door, along with a handwritten note that I could barely read in the beam of my phone torch. The door stuck, as doors in old properties do when the weather turns, and I shouldered it open with perhaps more force than dignity required. The interior swallowed us whole. The central heating had been left on low, and the warmth felt almost solid after the rawness outside, carrying with it the particular dry scent of a house that has been closed up against the season.

I found the light switches eventually, and the rooms revealed themselves in stages. The beamed ceilings were lower than I had expected, the walls thicker. Everything spoke of a building that had learned to endure Picardy winters long before central heating existed. There was a fireplace in the sitting room, laid ready with kindling and logs, and I felt an almost childish eagerness to light it despite the radiators doing perfectly adequate work.

The kitchen window looked out onto blackness. In summer, I imagined, you might see the garden, perhaps a terrace, the trees in full leaf. Now there was only the reflection of the room behind me, and beyond that, the sense of a landscape withdrawn into itself, waiting. I put the kettle on for that thermos tea, which by now was lukewarm and faintly metallic, and stood there listening to the unfamiliar sounds of an old house in a cold season. The heating system gurgled. Something in the roof space shifted, perhaps a bird, perhaps just the contraction of timber in the dropping temperature.

My partner had already found the bedroom and was making appreciative noises about the duvet weight. I joined them, tea in hand, and we stood at the window together, looking at nothing, feeling the particular intimacy that comes from arriving somewhere in darkness, when the place withholds its full character and offers only hints and suggestions. Tomorrow, I knew, we would wake to frost on the grass, perhaps mist lying low across the fields, the season making its presence felt in every visible breath. The Chateau de Chantilly would be there, ten minutes away, its formal gardens reduced to structural bones without their summer softness. The forest would offer walks through ankle-deep leaf litter, the paths muddy, the light filtered through branches that scratched at the sky.

But that was for the morning. For now, there was only this: the warmth of the house, the weight of the darkness outside, the small triumph of having arrived despite my navigational failures, and the quiet pleasure of knowing that November in Picardy asks nothing of you but to be present in it, to accept its muted colours and early nights and the particular honesty of a landscape that makes no attempt to charm. I finished my tea, properly cold now, and began to unpack with the contentment of someone who has, against modest odds, found their way to exactly where they needed to be.