I have never been so grateful for a pair of waterproof trousers in my entire life, and that includes the time I got caught in a downpour at Glastonbury wearing nothing but denim shorts and misplaced optimism. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning, which was a five-hour drive from the ferry at Rotterdam that my sat-nav confidently assured me would take three and a half.

The mishap came roughly forty minutes from Thale, somewhere on the B6, when I realised with a sinking feeling that I had left my walking boots on the kitchen table in Manchester. Not tucked behind the sofa or hiding in the boot. On the actual kitchen table, positioned neatly beside the fruit bowl like some sort of still-life painting entitled "Idiot Forgets Essential Item." I pulled into a petrol station, stared at my trainers, and made a decision that would define the next three days: I would hike the Harz in footwear designed primarily for supermarket runs.

The property itself, when I finally arrived, almost made me forget the boot debacle. Thale sits right where the Bode Valley narrows into proper drama, and the holiday home had that satisfying German efficiency about it - spotless, warm, with a balcony that looked directly toward the Hexentanzplatz. I stood there with a cup of tea that first evening, watching mist roll across the hills like someone had left a giant kettle boiling, and felt that particular contentment of having arrived somewhere that actually matches the brochure.

Morning brought the weather, and I use that word deliberately because British weather is a known quantity - drizzle, mostly, with occasional ambitious attempts at sunshine. The Harz weather, I discovered, operates on an entirely different schedule. I set out for the Rosstrappe at nine in conditions that could only be described as "promising," wearing my trainers with the grim determination of someone who refuses to let poor planning ruin a perfectly good mountain.

The path starts steeply, winding through beech forest that felt almost embarrassingly picturesque. I was congratulating myself on my adaptability when the first squall hit. Not rain, exactly. More like horizontal moisture with attitude. My waterproof jacket held, but my trousers - standard walking trousers, nothing fancy - soaked through in approximately four minutes. I found shelter under an overhang, shared with a very damp German couple who looked at my trainers with the expression of paramedics assessing a particularly optimistic motorcyclist.

We did not share a language, but we shared a moment of mutual weather-induced misery. They produced proper chocolate from proper pockets; I produced a squashed cereal bar from a pocket that had apparently developed a leak. The exchange was awkward and beautiful.

I turned back, defeated but not downhearted, and spent the afternoon drying everything in the holiday home's excellent heating system while reading about local witch legends. The Hexentanzplaze, I learned, was where witches supposedly gathered for their sabbath, which seemed entirely reasonable given the weather they would have encountered.

Day two, I was better prepared. Borrowed wellies from a surprisingly well-stocked local shop, proper map, and a weather forecast checked so frequently the app probably thought I was stalking it. The Bode Valley gorge walk from Thale to Treseburg became my redemption - fourteen kilometres of proper paths, dramatic cliffs, and the kind of autumn colours that make you understand why Germans get so emotional about forests. The wellies were not ideal, but they were dry, and after yesterday's soaking, dry felt like luxury incarnate.

The weather held, mostly, with that particular Harz trick of sudden clearings where sunlight would hit the valley floor like a spotlight, then disappear just as you got your camera ready. I stopped at a hut for soup that tasted of smoke and patience, and watched two proper hikers with proper boots stride past with the easy superiority of people who had not left their footwear in another country.

Day three brought fog so thick I could barely see the balcony rail. I walked anyway, because I am stubborn and because the Bodetal in fog has its own atmosphere - muffled, mysterious, slightly threatening in a way that makes you understand all those witch stories. The path to the chairlift station became an exercise in navigation by feel, my breath joining the general moisture until I was indistinguishable from the landscape.

I slipped once, dramatically, on a wooden step, and performed an involuntary dance that would have been humiliating had anyone witnessed it. The forest kept my secret.

By the final afternoon, the weather had settled into something approaching English drizzle, and I found myself almost nostalgic for the drama. I did a gentle circuit of Thale itself, past the Walpurgishalle with its witchy exhibitions, along the river where the Bode proper begins its rush through the gorge. My borrowed wellies had developed a companionship with my feet that felt almost earned.

Sitting on that balcony one last time, with proper boots ordered online to the next destination, I reflected on the particular British impulse that makes us attempt foreign landscapes with domestic preparation. The trainers on the kitchen table had forced an improvisation that became, in its way, more memorable than the planned hike would have been. I had walked less far, perhaps, but I had walked more attentively, more aware of each step, each weather front, each small negotiation with terrain that did not care about my holiday schedule.

The Harz had not been gentle, but it had been fair. And as the mist rolled in again, obscuring the Hexentanzplatz where witches still dance in imagination if not in fact, I felt something like the satisfaction of having earned my place there, one damp step at a time.