I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in my life. Three hours after leaving Marseille airport, my hire car and I had achieved what I can only describe as a complete psychological break with modern navigation. The sat nav had calmly instructed me to turn left into what turned out to be a lavender field. The lavender, it must be said, smelled magnificent. My dignity, less so.

The wall belonged to Mas de la Brune, our holiday let just outside Saint-Remy-de-Provence, and I found it entirely by accident after abandoning technology in favour of following a tractor. The farmer waved. I waved back with the desperate enthusiasm of a man who had just spent forty minutes circulating the same roundabout near Maussane-les-Alpilles three times.

My partner opened the passenger door before I had fully stopped, a habit I find both endearing and medically inadvisable. She stood there in the late afternoon sun, taking in the honey-coloured farmhouse, the shuttered windows, the climbing roses that someone had clearly tended with genuine affection rather than the performative gardening one sees in magazines. "You've got mud on your ear," she said. I had driven through a puddle of some agricultural distinction. We both decided to pretend this was normal.

The key was under a terracotta pot, which felt deliciously illicit. Inside, the house smelled of dried herbs and old wood, that particular scent of Provencal properties where the heat has baked everything into something permanent and comforting. I immediately walked into a low beam, adding insult to the various insults already sustained. The beam had been doing this since approximately 1780. I felt it had won fair and square.

We had planned precisely nothing for the evening, which is to say our planning had failed to survive first contact with the journey. This proved, as these things do, to be the making of everything. Rather than the recommended restaurant in town, we wandered down an unmarked track behind the property, chasing the sound of running water and the vague theory that civilisation tends to accumulate near water sources, or at minimum, one might wash the mud off.

The track delivered us to a ruined borie, one of those dry-stone shepherd's huts that litter this landscape like forgotten thoughts. A family of wild boar had clearly been using it as some kind of social venue. The evidence was abundant and aromatic. We retreated with the dignity of people who have trespassed on a pig's private members' club and found ourselves, quite without meaning to, on a ridge overlooking the Alpilles.

The light was doing that thing it does in Provence, the thing that makes painters weep and photographers bankrupt themselves on equipment. Everything appeared slightly impossible, slightly too golden, slightly as though someone had adjusted the saturation slider with irresponsible enthusiasm. We sat on a rock that had probably supported a Roman bottom at some point and watched the shadows lengthen across olive groves we had not known existed.

"Should we try to find our way back?" my partner asked, eventually.

I considered this. The sat nav was in the car, sulking. My phone had achieved four percent battery through some mysterious process of self-sabotage. The track we had followed had forked at least twice in ways I had failed to properly commit to memory, distracted as I was by butterflies and the persistent sense of being somewhere I had not earned through proper preparation.

"We could just live here now," I suggested. "Become interesting hermits. Grow suspicious of outsiders."

She laughed, and we did eventually find our way back, though I could not afterwards reconstruct precisely how. The house welcomed us with its particular silence, the kind that makes urban visitors slightly uncomfortable until they remember that silence is not actually threatening, merely unfamiliar.

That evening, we ate bread and cheese and tomatoes from a farm shop we had spotted during one of my more creative navigational detours. We drank wine from a bottle with a label we could not properly read. We sat in the garden until the mosquitoes, democratic in their attentions, drove us indoors.

I have stayed in many places where the experience matched the brochure with exhausting precision. Saint-Remy-de-Provence, encountered through wrong turns and agricultural mishaps, stubbornly refused this format. The mishaps became the story. The getting lost became the finding. I would not have planned it this way, which is, I suspect, exactly why it worked.