The sat nav gave up on us roughly halfway between Gdansk and wherever it thought we were going, which is how I found myself at a petrol station near Kartuzy, trying to pronounce "Jamnowski Mlyn" to a very patient woman who eventually just pointed and said, "Tak, wodny mlyn," like that cleared everything up. It did not. But off we went, down increasingly narrow lanes, until I confidently turned down what I declared was "definitely a shortcut" and promptly deposited our Renault into a ditch of nettles so impressive it could have been a tourist attraction in its own right.

Forty minutes, one farmer with a tractor, and a significant dent to my pride later, we arrived. And I mean really arrived. The sort of arrival where your shoulders drop three inches without permission.

Jamnowski Mlyn sits there like it has all the time in the world, which of course it does. An old water mill, all timber and red roof tiles, with the Radunia river slipping past as if it is barely bothering to make an effort. My first thought, standing in the courtyard with my nettle-stung ankle throbbing gently, was that I had accidentally stumbled into a painting. My second thought was that I desperately needed a cup of tea and somewhere horizontal.

The owner, a chap called Marek who spoke the kind of English that made my Polish feel even more inadequate, showed us round with the unhurried pace of someone who has never once checked a watch for pleasure. The place smells of wood smoke and old stone and something else I could not identify, which Marek eventually explained was dried mushrooms in the pantry. Of course it was. This is Kashubia. Mushrooms are practically currency.

I had brought three books, ambitiously, and a walking route map I had printed with what now seems like almost tragic optimism. The books got a proper look-in. The map remained in my bag until day four, when I used it to swat a wasp.

Our first morning, I woke to actual birdsong rather than the wheezing bin lorry that constitutes dawn in my bit of south London. I lay there, in a bed that creaked with historical significance, and watched dust motes wander through a sunbeam like they were also on holiday. By ten I had achieved precisely nothing except finishing a chapter and eating an entire packet of Polish biscuits I had told myself were for "emergencies." The emergency, apparently, was being in a water mill with no urgent plans whatsoever.

The garden became our territory. A patch of grass sloping down to the river, a couple of ancient deckchairs that required a certain technique to mount without catastrophe, and a tree that delivered shade with the precision of a professional. I read. My partner dozed. Occasionally one of us would murmur something about perhaps going for a walk later, and the other would make a non-committal noise, and that would be the end of that discussion. It was glorious.

We did manage a stroll to the village one afternoon, a whole twenty minutes away, where we bought bread from a shop that appeared to open according to mood rather than schedule, and ate pierogi at a table outside someone's house that doubled as a cafe on Saturdays. The pierogi were heavier than my regrets about the sat nav, and I ate six.

What struck me, and here comes that gentle self-reflection I promised, was how aggressively I had been resisting this pace. The first day I kept reaching for my phone, checking emails I did not need to check, making mental lists of "things to do" in an area whose entire charm is that there is nothing much to do. By day three I had stopped pretending. The phone stayed in my bag. The lists evaporated. I became, to my slight alarm, a person who could sit in a deckchair for two hours watching a river and genuinely not require a justification for it.

The water wheel still turns, by the way. You can hear it from the garden, a slow, wet rhythm that sounds like the mill is breathing. I found myself matching my breathing to it, which I recognise sounds like something from a mindfulness app, but there you go. Kashubia gets under your skin like that.

On our final evening, Marek brought us some of his own honey, which tasted of whatever flowers grow in fields nobody rushes through. We sat on the step as the light went, not talking much, watching bats begin their evening commute. I thought about the ditch, the nettles, my terrible pronunciation. I thought about how I would describe this to people back home, and knew I would fail.

Some holidays you come back from with stories. This one, I came back from with something quieter. A sunburn in the shape of a deckchair strap. A half-read novel I have still not finished, because finishing it feels like admitting something is over. And the certain knowledge that somewhere in northern Poland, a water mill keeps turning, indifferent to whether anyone is watching or not.

I am already plotting when I can be not watching again.