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 spent twenty minutes circling a petrol station in Quedlinburg convinced I was nearly there. My partner, who had been suspiciously quiet for several miles, finally muttered that perhaps the large sign reading "Quedlinburg 12km" might be relevant. I blamed German road numbering. She blamed me. We were both, in our ways, correct.

The actual approach to Thale proper was considerably more dramatic than my navigational shame. The Bode Gorge opens up before you like something from a Brothers Grimm fever dream, those sheer limestone cliffs crowding the road as if curious about your business. I kept expecting a troll to demand a toll. Instead we got a farmer in a flat cap waving us past his tractor with the patient weariness of someone who has watched countless tourists discover that German country lanes are not designed for British optimism about vehicle width.

Our cottage sat on the edge of Thale, the sort of solid, unpretentious place that looks like it has witnessed several centuries of Harz weather and found it all rather tedious. I was still unloading cases when our neighbour emerged, a wiry chap in his seventies called Klaus who spoke English with the precision of someone who learned it exclusively from 1950s radio broadcasts. He inspected our parking with the gravity of a man assessing structural foundations, then pronounced it "adequate, though perhaps fortunate." I chose to take this as warmth.

Klaus, it transpired, knew everything about everyone in a three-mile radius and was generous with this intelligence. Within ten minutes I learned that the woman running the bakery had inherited her mother's stubbornness, that the local forester was "not a fool, but frequently mistaken," and that we absolutely must try the beer from a microbrewery run by a former Leipzig engineer who had "retired into hops with considerable seriousness." He said this last with evident approval.

The engineer himself, Dieter, we encountered that evening at the village's single proper pub, a low-beamed establishment where the lighting suggested permanent candlelit intimacy regardless of actual hour. Dieter had the intense, slightly wild eyes of a man who had found his true calling late in life. He talked us through his brewing philosophy for forty minutes, growing increasingly animated about water mineral content, while his wife Helga periodically appeared from the kitchen to roll her eyes with the practised affection of decades. "He was boring about electricity before," she told me, delivering a plate of Handkase that I suspect she knew I did not recognise. "Now it is fermentation. For me, no improvement." She said this loudly enough for Dieter to hear; he beamed with what I can only describe as marital pride.

What struck me, that first evening, was how these encounters accumulated into something like being temporarily adopted. The pub landlord, a heavyset former miner called Uwe whose hands suggested he still did something more physical than pulling pints, insisted on explaining the proper way to drink his Rauchbier. "Not like Coca-Cola," he instructed, watching me with undisguised suspicion until I demonstrated appropriate reverence. When I asked about the mining, he talked instead about his grandfather's stories of the Wichtel, the little folk of the Harz, and whether I thought such things were merely stories. I said I was keeping an open mind. He nodded as if I had passed some test.

By the time we walked back to the cottage, slightly unsteady on the unlit lane, I was already realising how much I had been expecting Germany to feel efficient and somehow distant, and how completely Thale refused this script. These were not people performing hospitality; they were simply being themselves with the confidence of those who had never much considered being otherwise. The Harz has that quality, I think, of having seen too much history to bother with pretence. The cliffs, the forests, the villages tucked into valleys, they endure, and so do the people who belong to them.

I thought about this as I tripped over the cottage step, my partner's laughter mixing with Klaus's dog barking from next door, and decided that being slightly ridiculous in such a place felt entirely appropriate. The Harz, after all, had already established that it was not a region that demanded competence, merely good humour and a willingness to be corrected by those who know better. I could manage that for a week.