The satnav gave up somewhere between Angouleme and nowhere, which is how I found myself reversing down a one-track lane in Poitou-Charentes, convinced I'd just flattened a vineyard. I hadn't, thankfully, though the elderly gentleman leaning on his gate seemed less than convinced by my frantic hand gestures. He wore a cap that had seen better decades and studied me with the patient amusement of someone who'd watched countless Brits get gloriously lost in his backyard.

"Champmillon?" he repeated, rolling the name around his mouth like a fine cognac. "Oui, oui. You follow." He shuffled to his battered Citroen and proceeded to lead me through a maze of lanes at approximately twelve miles per hour, waving serenely at every passing tractor as if we were in a presidential convoy. I later learned this was Marcel, village fixture since approximately 1952, and that his guided tours of the lost were something of a local institution.

The Champmillon itself materialised through a tunnel of plane trees, a sturdy stone farmhouse with that particular French talent for looking simultaneously rustic and rather pleased with itself. My first impression, once Marcel had accepted my effusive thanks with a shrug that suggested he'd done nothing special, was of profound quiet broken only by distant cowbells and what I initially thought was a broken washing machine. It turned out to be a very contented donkey in the neighbouring field, who I would come to know as Bernard and who possessed the most judgmental bray in western France.

The key handover came not from an owner but from Madame Fournier, the cleaner, who had been entrusted with this sacred duty for twenty-three years. She arrived on a moped that sounded angrier than Bernard, produced the key from a tobacco tin, and immediately began interrogating me about my intentions toward the property. "You cook?" she demanded, suspicious. "Or you eat out like the English?" I admitted to both possibilities. She nodded, somehow disappointed in advance, and spent twenty minutes demonstrating the wood-burning stove with the theatrical patience of someone explaining quantum physics to a toddler. "Not difficult," she kept saying, as I failed to light it three times running. "You are trying too hard. Like your driving."

That evening I walked to the village, if one can call a cluster of houses, a boulangerie, and a bar that might open depending on atmospheric conditions a village. The boulangerie had closed at midday because Madame Lefranc, the baker, had "a feeling," according to the handwritten note. The bar, miraculously, was open, and contained three men playing cards with the intensity of international diplomacy and a woman behind the counter who regarded my request for a beer as a moderately interesting development in her afternoon.

I sat with my demi and attempted to look inconspicuous, which in a bar where everyone else was related by blood or ancient grudge proved ambitious. Within ten minutes I had been comprehensively assessed by silent consensus and formally adopted by Jean-Paul, the youngest card player at sixty-eight, who insisted on buying me a second beer and explaining, in magnificent Franglais, why his brother-in-law was a fool. The brother-in-law, present and playing cards opposite him, nodded cheerful agreement. "He is right," the brother-in-law told me, with the resigned air of a man who had accepted his foolishness long ago. "But I have the better land."

Walking back to the Champmillon in the thickening dark, slightly beer-happy and followed by Bernard's commentary from his field, I found myself reflecting on the peculiar intimacy of being somewhere properly rural. Cities offer anonymity; villages offer Marcel appearing from nowhere to rescue you, Madame Fournier's tobacco-tin keys, Jean-Paul's brother-in-law accepting his own foolishness with equanimity. I had come for the stone farmhouse and the plane trees, but I was staying, I realised, for the people who couldn't help treating a lost stranger as temporarily theirs.

The wood-burning stove defeated me entirely that first night. I sat in my jumper, laughed at myself, and listened to Bernard's judgmental bray carrying across the fields. Tomorrow, I decided, I would ask Madame Fournier to demonstrate again. She would sigh. She would succeed immediately. She would make me feel like a child, and I would absolutely love it.