I should have known the Harz would have the last laugh when I confidently told the sat nav to take us to "Thale, Harz" and it promptly deposited us in a farmyard three villages away, where a very patient man with two enormous dogs explained through my terrible German that I had confused two entirely different roads with remarkably similar names. Forty-five minutes of winding through forests later, we finally spotted the actual property, tucked among trees with that particular stillness you only get in proper woodland.

The owner, a wiry chap called Klaus who looked like he had been hewn from the same granite as the surrounding hills, was waiting on the doorstep with a mug of something steaming and a expression of amused resignation. "You are the English," he announced, not as a question. "The last English I had here, they also could not find it. I think your schools do not teach compass." He handed me the mug, which turned out to be excellent coffee, and proceeded to give us a tour that was part property induction, part local history lecture, and entirely entertaining.

His wife, Renate, appeared from the garden with soil still on her hands and immediately began apologising for the "mess" of wildflowers she had apparently planted deliberately. "Klaus says it looks unkempt," she confided, though he was standing right there. "I tell him, the bees do not care for tidy." She laughed with her whole body, and I liked her instantly.

That evening, having failed to light the wood burner with anything approaching competence, I knocked on their door to beg matches and advice. Klaus appeared with an armful of kindling and a look of long-suffering kindness. "In Harz," he said, crouching before our hopeless pile of logs, "we have a saying: the fire teaches patience, or it teaches you to freeze." He had the thing roaring in minutes, then settled onto our sofa without invitation and began telling stories about the region that wandered down paths I could never have anticipated.

He spoke of the Brocken, visible on clear days, and how the old women in the village still leave offerings on certain nights, though they would never admit to anything so pagan. "My grandmother," he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, "she would say it was for the tourists, this witch business. But I saw her once, at three in morning, walking toward the hill with bread in her hands. She was ninety-two. She did not walk so well to church."

Renate appeared with schnapps and completed his sentences, corrected his exaggerations, and occasionally contradicted him entirely. They bickered with the easy rhythm of fifty years' practice, and I found myself envying them that comfortable friction, that certainty of being known completely.

The next morning, I encountered their neighbour, an elderly woman called Frau Hoffman who was leaning on our garden fence as if she had been waiting specifically for my embarrassment. I had emerged in pyjamas to retrieve something from the car, and she assessed me with the frank curiosity of someone who has earned the right to stare. "You are too thin," she decided. "The walking here is good. You will eat potatoes, you will walk, you will improve." She said this with such cheerful certainty that I found myself agreeing that yes, I would indeed improve.

Over the following days, these characters became the texture of the place. The baker who refused to sell me bread until I pronounced "Broetchen" to his satisfaction, then gave me an extra roll for effort. The teenage boy at the hiking shop who spoke perfect English, having learned entirely from video games, and who described every trail in terms of "loot" and "boss levels." The woman at the tiny supermarket who remembered my purchase of terrible local wine and commented on my "progress" when I returned for something drinkable.

I realised, somewhere around day four, that I had come to the Harz expecting landscape and found people instead. The mountains were beautiful, certainly, but they were merely the backdrop for this chorus of voices, each with their own particular cadence, their own way of placing you in the world whether you had asked for the orientation or not.

On our final evening, Klaus and Renate invited us for a proper drink. Klaus raised his glass and said something in German that Renate translated as "may you always arrive somewhere worth getting lost for." I thought about our ridiculous arrival, my stubborn confidence in technology over common sense, and how that wrong turn had somehow led exactly where we needed to be.

We left the next morning with potatoes from Renate's garden, directions written in Klaus's emphatic capital letters, and the lingering sense that we had been briefly absorbed into something we barely understood but entirely appreciated.