I have never been so grateful for a cup of tea as I was the afternoon we arrived in Thale. The journey from Calais had been one of those classic British-in-Germany affairs: sat nav confidently announcing we were twelve minutes away for roughly ninety minutes, while the Harz mountains did their best impression of the Scottish Highlands in November. Which, as it happened, was exactly the season we had chosen.

The mishap came at a petrol station just outside Wernigerode. I had been practising my German all morning, feeling rather pleased with myself for ordering two coffees without accidentally declaring war. Then I tried to ask where to buy a vignette for the local roads. What I actually said, according to my partner, was something closer to "My grandmother is a small cheese." The attendant looked at me with the patient confusion of someone who has heard worse. We bought a map we did not need and drove on, me muttering about the treachery of GCSE German and the particular cruelty of umlauts.

The Thale property sat at the edge of Bodetal, that dramatic valley where the Bode river has carved its way through granite over millennia. Our arrival coincided with the last proper afternoon of autumn light, though "light" feels generous. The Harz in late November does not do light. It does atmosphere, thick and grey and somehow comforting, like a wool blanket that has been left out in drizzle. The trees had surrendered most of their leaves, and what remained clung on in that desperate, half-hearted way that suggests even they were not convinced. The property itself, a traditional Harz half-timbered affair, looked exactly as the photographs had promised, which is to say it looked like somewhere a Brothers Grimm character might consider for retirement.

I had worried the off-season timing would feel like a compromise, the holiday equivalent of buying reduced bakery items. Instead, it shaped everything. The heating had been left on, that particular generosity of hosts who understand what November in Saxony-Anhalt means. The wooden beams creaked in a way that would have been ominous in summer but felt companionable now, as if the house itself was settling in for the long dark months. We unpacked slowly, neither of us quite ready to admit how tired the drive had made us, and stood at the kitchen window watching the valley disappear into mist.

The local shop in Thale had already switched to its winter stock: root vegetables, heavy bread, those enormous jars of pickled things that German cuisine does so unapologetically. We bought supplies for a stew and walked back through streets that felt emptied by design rather than neglect. The Hexentanzplatz, that famous plateau above the town, was invisible in the low cloud. In summer it would have been bustling with hikers and the cable car running constantly. Now it was simply there, waiting, and we found we did not mind the postponement. Some things keep.

That evening, rain against the windows and the stew doing its slow work, I caught myself feeling almost smug about our timing. Summer visitors would have had views, certainly, and longer days for walking. They would not have had this particular stillness, the sense that the landscape had drawn breath and held it. The Harz in November offers no distractions from itself. You take it as it is, moody and withdrawn and occasionally spectacular when a break in the clouds allows a glimpse of the Brocken on the horizon.

I thought about my grandmother, who was not a small cheese, and how she had always maintained that the best holidays were the ones where something small went wrong early, giving you permission to stop trying so hard. The language mishap, the grey skies, the closed-for-winter attractions: these became the frame rather than the flaw. We were not conquering the Harz. We were visiting it in its less sociable season, and finding it surprisingly good company.

The tea, when I finally made it, was Yorkshire Gold brought from home. Some preparations you do not trust even to excellent German supermarkets. I sat with it in the dimming room, watching the mist thicken in the valley below, and felt something I can only describe as the particular contentment of being exactly where you intended, at a time you did not know you needed.