The drive up to Idre Kringelfjorden had been going suspiciously well, which in hindsight should have been my first warning. I'd managed the hire car, the snowy roads, even the bit where my phone insisted I was in Norway. Then, not three minutes from the property, I spotted what I thought was a shortcut down a track between two red wooden barns. The track turned out to be someone's driveway. Their very long, very private driveway. I emerged at a farmyard to find an elderly man in traditional blue overalls leaning on a gate, watching me with the patient expression of someone who had seen this exact stupidity before.

"English?" he said, not quite a question.

I wound down the window, already rehearsing my apology.

"Lost the main road," I admitted.

He scratched his beard, considering this. "Main road is there." He pointed back the way I'd come. "You are here." He pointed at his boots. Then, incredibly, he laughed. A proper wheezing chuckle that made his shoulders shake. "Come. Coffee. You need to turn around anyway, and my wife made too much."

I tried to decline. He waved it away as if I'd suggested something faintly ridiculous.

Ten minutes later I was in their kitchen, which smelled of cardamom and woodsmoke, while his wife Ingrid pressed a mug of strong coffee into my hands and explained, with minimal English and extravagant hand gestures, that her husband Lars had once driven his tractor into the same ditch I had nearly found. Lars nodded solemnly through this, though I suspect the details were being embellished for my benefit. Their collie, an ancient thing called Fjell, slept on my foot and refused to move.

When I finally extracted myself with directions so detailed they included which boulder marked the correct turning, I found the property easily. The cabin sat above Kringelfjorden with that particular Swedish stillness you cannot quite believe is real until you see it. I stood on the deck with my bag still unpacked, watching the light settle on the water, and felt that peculiar holiday sensation of being slightly outside your own life.

The neighbour appeared the next morning while I was attempting to work out the sauna. A woman in her sixties with grey hair in a practical plait, carrying a basket of mushrooms. She introduced herself as Birgit and did not comment on my obvious confusion with the wood burner, which I appreciated. Instead she set down her basket, opened the vent I had failed to locate, and had the thing drawing properly within two minutes.

"You stay long?" she asked.

A week, I told her.

She nodded, filing this away. "I come Tuesday with cloudberries. You know cloudberries?"

I did not. This seemed to please her enormously.

Tuesday arrived with rain and Birgit arrived with berries and a flask of something she called "a little something for the cold," which turned out to be aquavit and which turned out, additionally, to be unnecessary given how warm the sauna had become. We sat on the deck in waterproof jackets, watching the fjord disappear into low cloud, and she told me about growing up in a village that no longer existed, flooded for a hydroelectric project in the seventies. Her family had moved to Idre, which was then barely more than a few houses and a shop that sold everything from milk to tractor parts.

"Now tourists," she said, not unkindly. "But still quiet. Still good."

She left me the berries and a recipe involving cream and sugar that I have since attempted twice with mixed results.

The shop she mentioned, I discovered, was still there in Idre village. Run now by a man called Henrik who was perhaps forty and who had moved from Stockholm for what he described as "a temporary thing" fifteen years ago. He had the slightly dazed contentment of someone who had accidentally found exactly where he belonged. We talked cross-country skiing, which I had never tried, while he stocked shelves with the unhurried precision of someone who had never once considered hurry.

"You will fall," he said, when I mentioned perhaps trying it. "Everyone falls. The trick is to fall where it is soft."

This seemed to apply more broadly than he intended.

I fell, as predicted, on my third attempt at the prepared tracks near the cabin. A teenage boy materialised from somewhere, helped me upright without comment, and continued on his way with the gravity of someone performing a necessary but routine service. I never learned his name. He was simply part of the landscape, as natural as the birch trees and the particular quality of northern light that makes ordinary afternoons feel slightly enchanted.

By my final evening, Lars had waved at me twice from his tractor, Birgit had delivered more berries and some unsolicited advice about my fire-building technique, and Henrik had special-ordered me a particular brand of crispbread he insisted I needed to try. I sat in the sauna, which I could now operate competently, and thought about how I had arrived as a person who took wrong turns and left as someone who had been, however briefly, folded into a small community's ongoing conversation.

The fjord was silver-grey in the late light. Somewhere, presumably, Fjell the collie was sleeping on someone else's foot. I would miss the quiet, I realised. The particular quiet of a place where people have time to notice you, to find you slightly ridiculous, and to offer you coffee regardless.