I have never been so relieved to see a thatched roof in my life. Three hours of driving from the ferry at Hoek van Holland, two wrong turns round Groningen's ring road, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted "Vledder" was pronounced with a hard V, I finally crunched up the gravel drive of what I prayed was our holiday cottage. It was not. I had parked in a complete stranger's front garden. The complete stranger, a wiry chap in clogs and overalls, emerged from his barn wiping engine oil on a rag and simply pointed left, chuckling, "NovaSol, ja? Next farm. Always happens." I reversed with the dignity of a man who has just asked a shop assistant if they work here.

The actual cottage, when I found it, was a proper Drenthe farmhouse: thick walls, small windows, and a door lintel so low I cracked my forehead on it while unloading the boot. My partner found this hilarious until she did the same thing ten minutes later. We stood in the kitchen, rubbing our heads and giggling like children, while outside the evening light fell across flat fields dotted with those ancient hunebedden stone graves that make Drenthe feel older than everywhere else.

I had barely located the kettle when there came a knock at the door. Not a polite British tap-tap, but a proper Dutch thump-thump-thump. A woman stood there, perhaps sixty, with steel-grey hair yanked back in a practical bun and wellies that had seen serious agricultural action. She thrust forward a plate of what appeared to be thick slices of gingerbread. "I am Grietje," she announced, as if this settled everything. "From the sheep farm. You are the English. I watched you park in Henk's garden. Everyone does this. He waits for it. Here, eat." The gingerbread was dense as a brick and absolutely delicious. She stood in our doorway, refusing to come in, and delivered a ten-minute monologue about local sheep varieties while we stood there like students at a lecture, nodding and chewing.

The next morning I cycled to the village shop for milk, because the cottage had bicycles with tyres so thick they could probably traverse a peat bog. The shop turned out to be a front room operation run by a man called Sietse who spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from wartime films. "Good day, sir," he barked. "Milk? Yes. Fresh. From my cousin's cows. Not those supermarket criminals." He wrapped my milk in newspaper, an affectation I suspect he maintained purely for English tourists, and pressed a free stroopwafel on me "for the journey." The journey was four hundred metres.

That afternoon, walking near the Drents-Friese Wold, I encountered a fellow with binoculars round his neck and a thermos clipped to his belt like a sidearm. He was studying a tree with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. "Woodpecker," he whispered, not looking at me. "Lesser spotted. Very rare. You are staying in the old Vledder farmhouse, yes? I am Klaas. I watch that house for birds. Good roof for swallows. Last year, seven nests." He told me his life story in fifteen minutes: retired maths teacher, divorced, three hundred and forty-seven bird species spotted in Drenthe alone. "You have time," he said, finally lowering his binoculars. "You are on holiday. I am always on holiday now. This is better than mathematics."

By evening, we had accumulated an accidental social circle. Grietje returned with her husband Dirk, a man of few words and many hand-rolled cigarettes, who examined our cottage's thatch with professional disapproval and pronounced it "acceptable." They stayed for exactly one beer each, refused all offers of food, and left with the same abruptness they had arrived. "Tomorrow," Grietje called over her shoulder, "I bring cheese. Real cheese. Not that red nonsense from Edam."

I sat on the tiny terrace as darkness fell, listening to nothing much at all. Drenthe's silence is different from countryside silence elsewhere: flatter, somehow, more absolute. Somewhere a dog barked, and another dog answered, and then the nothingness returned. I thought about Klas and his birds, about Sietse and his criminal supermarkets, about Henk who waited in his barn for lost English drivers. I had come expecting tulips and canals, the greatest hits of Dutch tourism, and found instead this odd, stubborn, generous flatness full of people who simply appeared at your door and made themselves known.

My forehead still throbbed where I had hit the lintel. I touched it gently and smiled. Some holidays you plan. Others, it seems, simply accumulate around you like swallows on a thatched roof, one unexpected arrival at a time.