I'd driven up from the Hook of Holland with the sort of misplaced confidence that only a man who has never properly visited Friesland can muster. The satnav had given up somewhere past Zwolle, which I took as a personal challenge rather than the warning it clearly was. By the time I reached Oosterwolde, I had been round the same roundabout three times, each pass growing more theatrical in my muttered complaints. The third time, I noticed a woman walking her dog watching me with the patient expression of someone who had seen this exact performance many times before.

It was late October, and the light was doing that extraordinary thing it does in this part of the Netherlands, all low gold and stretched shadows across the flat fields. I had chosen autumn deliberately, chasing some half-remembered notion of cosiness, of woodsmoke and thick jumpers and the particular silence that comes when the tourist season has packed up and gone home. What I had not properly accounted for was the damp, or the way the wind finds every gap in your clothing with the precision of a trained assassin.

The cottage sat at the end of a narrow lane, backed up against woodland that was in the full throes of turning. The maples were frankly showing off, burning orange and red against the still-green oaks, and the ground was already carpeted with leaves that squelched pleasantly underfoot. My landlady, a brisk woman called Mevrouw de Vries, met me at the door with a mug of something hot that turned out to be aniseed tea, which I drank with the desperate politeness of the British abroad. She showed me the wood-burning stove with the reverence usually reserved for religious artefacts, explaining that the nights were drawing in proper now and I would want it lit by four at the latest.

She was not wrong. By half past three the sky had shifted from that theatrical gold to a flat pewter, and the temperature seemed to drop in noticeable increments, as if someone was turning down a dial. I spent my first evening in a state of constant adjustment, poking the stove, opening windows to let out smoke, closing them against the cold, realising I had made the room tropical, opening them again. The cottage creaked and settled around me, the wood contracting in the cooling air, and outside I could hear the wind moving through the trees with a sound like distant traffic.

What struck me most, lying in the unfamiliar darkness later, was how completely the season had emptied the place of everything but itself. No distant music from summer barbecues, no voices carrying across the fields, just the wind and the occasional call of a barn owl somewhere in those woods. I had come seeking solitude, or so I told myself, but there is a difference between solitude and the particular loneliness of a Dutch autumn evening when the darkness arrives early and stays late.

The morning brought a frost that silvered the grass and made the world seem temporarily forgiving. I walked to the edge of the village, past houses with their curtains still drawn against the cold, past a canal where a single heron stood motionless as a statue. The light was different now, sharper, more honest about the winter that was coming. Everything felt provisional, the last leaves holding on with diminishing conviction, the fields ploughed to dark earth and waiting.

I found a cafe open, the only one, and sat with coffee that tasted of the machine it had been made in, watching a group of elderly men play cards with the intensity of professional athletes. They ignored me completely, which I found rather comforting. This was not a season for strangers, not really. It was a season for people who understood the local rhythm, who knew which days the baker opened late, which paths became impassable after rain.

By the time I walked back, the frost had melted to a general wetness, and the sky was returning to that familiar pewter. I could see my breath, though, and knew that tonight the stove would be easier, that I would get the hang of it, that slowly I too would learn the rhythm of this place in this particular season. The heron was still there, still waiting, and I stood watching it for longer than I could reasonably explain, two creatures temporarily suspended between what the year had been and what it was becoming.