I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what appeared to be someone's back garden in Sneek. Three hours from the ferry at Hook of Holland, and there I was, arguing with a woman in wellies about whether her driveway constituted a public right of way. She won, obviously. Dutch women in wellies always do.

The actual route to Witmarsum took me past the sort of flat, watery landscape that makes you understand why Frisians are so obsessed with skating. Every field seemed to have its own canal, its own particular arrangement of cows, and its own resident leaning on a gate looking mildly entertained by my second attempt at navigation. I stopped twice for directions. The first time, a chap called Sietse spent ten minutes explaining the difference between the eleven Frisian cities before admitting my cottage was literally visible from where we stood. The second time, an elderly woman named Trijn simply pointed and said, "You drove past it. The one with the red door. We watched you go by." The "we," I later discovered, referred to roughly half the village.

The cottage itself sat on a quiet lane at the edge of Witmarsum, a proper red-brick affair with that distinctive Frisian architecture - steep gables, small windows that suggested serious winters, and a front garden so aggressively tidy it made me feel personally attacked. I was still fumbling with the key safe when my neighbour emerged. Henk. Seventy-ish, wearing trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a very old leather belt. He introduced himself by informing me that the previous occupants had left a cheese in the fridge and that he had eaten it. "Not sorry," he added, with the satisfaction of a man who has lived long enough to take what he wants.

The interior smelled of wood polish and something faintly maritime. I later learned this was because Henk had "helpfully" aired the place by opening every window for three hours that morning, despite it being April and despite there being a perfectly functional heating system. "Fresh air," he announced, when I mentioned the Arctic temperature. "You English, you don't understand fresh air. You have London." He said "London" the way other people might say "the plague."

By teatime - though the Dutch don't really do teatime, something I would learn through painful social awkwardness - I had met three more characters. There was Joke from the bakery, who refused to believe I wanted to buy bread without also purchasing at least four pastries. "You look like a man who needs speculaas," she declared, in a tone that brooked no argument. She was not wrong. There was the mysterious figure I only knew as "the man who cleans the sluice," spotted at dusk performing some arcane ritual with a long pole and a bucket. Henk informed me he had been doing this for forty years and had never once spoken to anyone. "He spoke to a German once," Henk added, with dark significance. "Never again."

But the absolute star was Tineke, who ran the tiny museum in the village centre dedicated to Menno Simons, the Anabaptist reformer born in Witmarsum in 1496. I had not planned to visit. Tineke had planned for me to visit, appearing at my door with a leaflet and the relentless energy of a woman who had been waiting for fresh blood. The museum consisted of three rooms and what Tineke described as "perhaps the finest collection of sixteenth-century religious pamphlets in the northern Netherlands." I have no basis for disputing this. I spent ninety minutes there, largely because Tineke physically blocked the exit while recounting Menno's dramatic break with the Catholic Church, his flight across the Frisian countryside, and his eventual death in Germany. "He should have stayed," she concluded, with the bitterness of five centuries' distance. "The Germans have no sense of humour about these things."

That evening, Henk produced two beers and a folding chair and insisted we sit in my front garden, which he still considered partially his territory. We watched the sluice man make his final patrol. We waved at Trijn, who was clearly watching from her window. Henk told me about his late wife, about the time he tried to sail to Terschelling and ended up in Harlingen by mistake, about the village's complicated relationship with the annual ice-skating race that hadn't actually happened in twelve years because the weather had turned traitor. "Global warming," he said, with a shrug that suggested personal grievance. "Bad for skating. Good for tomatoes." He gestured vaguely towards his greenhouse, visible two gardens down, filled with what did indeed appear to be an aggressive number of tomato plants.

I went to bed that first night with the windows open - Henk's influence, or perhaps some strange Frisian conversion - and lay listening to the absolute silence of a village where nothing much happens and everyone watches it not happen together. Somewhere, a cow made a noise. Somewhere else, a bicycle passed, its rider whistling. I thought about Menno Simons fleeing through these same flat fields, about Tineke guarding his memory with such ferocious devotion, about Joke and her speculaas-based assessments of character. I thought about the cheese Henk had eaten, and whether I would ever truly forgive him.

I decided I probably would. But I was definitely buying a lock for the fridge.