I had convinced myself that driving through the Harz would be a doddle. I had the sat nav, a packet of wine gums, and that particular brand of overconfidence that comes from having successfully navigated the M25 twice in one month. Three hours in, I found myself down a single-track lane flanked by pine trees, wondering if I had accidentally crossed into Narnia. The wine gums were long gone. My phone had surrendered to the mountains and gone into full sulk mode. And I, in my infinite wisdom, had just followed a sign for "Thale" that turned out to be pointing at a footpath meant for goats.

The mishap itself was almost poetic. I had stopped to photograph what I thought was a charming rustic bridge, reversed slightly to get a better angle, and promptly sank one wheel into a drainage ditch disguised by autumn leaves. There I sat, hazard lights blinking away my shame, until a chap walking an enormous Bernese Mountain Dog happened past and helped me wedge a plank under the tyre. He spoke no English. I speak German like a toddler with a head cold. Between us, with much pointing and dog-watching, we got me back on solid ground. I never did get the photograph.

By the time I actually found the holiday home in Thale, I was two hours late, mildly traumatised, and absolutely ravenous. The property sat on a gentle slope with views down toward the Bode Valley, and I stood there with my single remaining bag - having left the other on the kitchen floor in my rush to escape the ditch - and felt something shift. The panic dissolved. The mountains do that, I think. They make your nonsense feel appropriately sized.

I had planned a structured first evening. Unpack, shower, perhaps a civilised stroll to orient myself. Instead, still flustered, I set off walking with no particular direction and promptly got lost again within twenty minutes. This time, though, there was no ditch. Just a narrow path that narrowed further, then opened without warning onto a small clearing where someone had placed a single wooden bench facing a view of the Selke Valley that no brochure had prepared me for. I sat. I stayed. The light did that slow golden thing it does in October, and somewhere below I could hear water moving over stone. I had not meant to find this place. I had meant to be efficient.

That became the pattern of the week, entirely by accident. I would set out with intentions and return with discoveries that bore no relation to them. A morning meant for the Hexentanzplatz - the famous plateau above Thale - turned instead into an afternoon following a stream I could hear but not see, which led me to a ruined stone bridge so overgrown with moss that it looked like something abandoned by fairies. I did not see another person for three hours. I talked to a squirrel. It was not interested.

The property itself became my base for these wanderings, and I grew fond of its particular rhythms. The way the heating clicked on at six with a sound like distant applause. The kitchen window that framed the Brocken on clear mornings, that highest peak watching me make terrible coffee. I started leaving the sat nav behind deliberately, taking only a paper map I barely understood and a rough sense of which valley I was aiming for.

On my fourth day, I took a wrong turning on what I thought was the trail toward Rosstrappe and found myself instead at a tiny hamlet called Allrode, where an elderly woman was selling jars of honey from her garden gate. We established through gestures and my regrettable German that her bees favoured heather from the higher slopes. I bought two jars. One broke in my rucksack on the walk home, coating my water bottle and spare socks in something impossibly sticky. I laughed properly for the first time in months, standing alone on a forest path, pulling honeyed sock from honeyed bottle.

The hidden places accumulated. A waterfall no guidebook mentioned, found by following the sound of it through bracken until my trousers were soaked to the knee. A clearing where someone had arranged stones into a rough circle, perhaps decades ago, perhaps last week. A bench carved from a single log, positioned to catch the afternoon sun, with a view over Treseburg that made me understand why people paint landscapes even though photographs exist.

I never did make it to the Hexentanzplatz. The witch's dance floor will have to wait for another visit. What I found instead was the particular pleasure of not finding what I sought, of trusting wrong turns and drainage ditches and the kindness of strangers with enormous dogs. The Harz gave me what I had not known to ask for: the slow realisation that getting lost is not always a problem to solve. Sometimes it is simply where the interesting things begin.

On my final morning, I walked deliberately back to that first bench in the clearing above the Selke Valley. I sat with my terrible coffee and watched the mist lift from the valley floor, revealing the village below house by house, like a developing photograph. I thought about the person who had placed that bench there, who had carried the wood up the narrow path, who had understood that this particular view deserved a pause. They must have got lost themselves once, I decided. They must have known what it could give you.