I should have known the Harz would have its revenge on me for being so smug about my packing. There I was, bombing down the A14 with a boot full of walking boots and an unearned sense of organisational superiority, when my sat nav decided to stage a small rebellion somewhere near Quedlinburg. One wrong turn became three, and by the time I limped into Thale, I had somehow managed to get my car wedged between two delivery lorries in a car park barely wider than a bicycle lane. A local butcher, complete with blood-stained apron and a moustache that deserved its own postcode, appeared at my window and simply said, "English?" before directing me out with hand signals that suggested he had done this many times before. I thanked him in my schoolboy German. He replied in flawless Yorkshire. Of course he did.

The property itself sat on the edge of town, a solid wooden affair that looked like it had been built by someone who genuinely understood winters. My host, a woman called Renate who moved with the unhurried purpose of someone who had never once checked a smartphone, handed me keys attached to a keyring the size of a dinner plate. "So you don't lose them," she said, though her eyes suggested she had her doubts. She showed me the sauna, the terrace, the wood-burning stove with the patient weariness of someone reciting a poem she knew by heart but no longer felt. I mentioned the butcher. Her face softened. "Ach, Dieter. He was in Leeds fifteen years. Came back for the quiet. Found his wife instead." She said this as if it explained everything about the human condition, and perhaps it did.

That evening, determined to make amends with the town, I walked to a small restaurant near the Bodetal valley entrance. The waiter, a young man with a shaved head and elaborate neck tattoos depicting what appeared to be various woodland creatures, took my order while simultaneously conducting a heated phone conversation about someone's improperly parked tractor. He apologised not at all. When my schnitzel arrived, it covered the plate like a geological feature. "You're walking tomorrow," he said, not asking. "You'll need it." I asked how he knew. He gestured at my boots, my rucksack, my general appearance of someone who had read too many hiking blogs. "Also, everyone walks here. What else is there?"

He introduced me to his grandfather, who occupied a corner table and appeared to have been sitting there since approximately 1987. The old man spoke no English but communicated through a series of grunts, meaningful eyebrow movements, and occasional pointed gestures at my plate when he felt I was eating too slowly. Through the grandson's reluctant translation, I learned he had worked in the local limestone quarry for forty years, that he thought the new cable car up to the Hexentanzplatz was "for soft people," and that he considered my jacket insufficiently serious for October in the Harz. "He says you will be cold," the grandson reported, with something approaching satisfaction.

I was cold, as it happened. The next morning, mist sat in the valley like someone had forgotten to clear it away, and my supposedly technical layers proved no match for the particular damp that seeps into these mountains. I encountered a fellow walker on the path toward the Rosstrappe, an elderly woman with two dogs of such radically different sizes that they appeared to be engaged in a perpetual comedy routine. She spoke to me for twenty minutes about mushroom foraging, the specific mushrooms she had foraged, the mushrooms she had failed to forage due to her husband's poor eyesight, and the mushrooms her grandmother had foraged before the war. I understood perhaps one word in eight. It did not seem to matter to either of us.

By the time I returned to the property, Renate had left me a note and a jar of something orange and unidentifiable. The note read simply: "Quince. Dieter brought it. For the Englishman who cannot drive." I sat on that solid wooden terrace as the afternoon light did its slow disappearing act behind the hills, and I thought about how I had come here chasing some vague idea of solitude and landscape, and had found instead this peculiar, persistent web of human connection, stretched across decades and borders and the occasional agricultural vehicle dispute. The quince was sharp and strange and nothing I would have chosen for myself. I ate it on bread for three days. I have been trying to find quince preserve in British supermarkets ever since, without success. Some things, I suppose, you simply have to go back for.