The satnav gave up somewhere near Mora, which I took as a sign we were properly in the wilderness. My partner, ever the optimist, insisted we were "nearly there." That was forty minutes before I confidently turned down what I later learned was a snowmobile track in July. The hire car's undercarriage made a noise like a cat being trodden on. I reversed with the dignity of a man who knows he's being watched, and indeed I was: an elderly chap in a faded blue cap, standing by a fence with two dogs that looked older than me.

"You're looking for the Saelen place," he said. Not a question. He'd clearly seen my type before.

I wound down the window, already rehearsing my apology for trespassing on what I now realised was his land. "Sorry about the track, I thought-"

"Everyone thinks that," he interrupted, in English that carried the faint lilt of someone who'd learned it watching BBC dramas. "The road bends left at the red house. Not the barn-red house. The other red house. You'll know it." I did not know it. But I thanked him and reversed some more, the car groaning its grievances.

We found the other red house twenty minutes later, and with it the proper track to our timber cabin. The Saelen sat among birch trees with that particular Swedish patience, as if it had been waiting centuries and could manage another afternoon. Red paint, white trim, the classic Dalarna silhouette. A woman was sweeping the porch with economical strokes, though there wasn't a leaf to be seen.

"You must be the Englishman who drove through Olle's meadow," she said, extending a hand. "I'm Ingrid. I clean between guests. Also, I gossip." She said this with evident pride. "Olle says your car makes a funny noise. He would know. He was a mechanic in Gothenburg for thirty years, then came home to watch tourists get lost." She laughed, a sound like gravel in honey. "He'll tell this story until winter."

I began my apology again, but Ingrid waved it away. "No, no. Olle is happy. He has a new story. Last summer it was only Germans, and they never get lost. Too efficient." She handed me keys attached to a carved wooden horse. "The Dala horse. Local tradition. This one I painted myself. The eyes are crooked, I know. I tell people it's artistic choice."

Inside, the cabin smelled of pine and something faintly vanilla that I later learned was the wood stove's seasoning. Ingrid showed me the quirks with the reverence of a museum guide: the tap that needed encouragement, the window that stuck in humidity, the coffee maker that "talks back" if you don't seat the pot properly. "My cousin made that," she said of a rough-hewn stool. "He's a terrible carpenter. Sit carefully."

She'd brought fresh eggs from her own hens, she explained, because "the shop eggs are depressed." I didn't argue. She also left a handwritten note about the sauna, which she'd annotated with a drawing of a stick figure looking alarmed. "Don't pour too much water," she'd written. "I did once. Thought I'd died."

That evening, as the light stretched impossibly long across the lake we could glimpse through the trees, another neighbour appeared. A young woman, maybe twenty-five, walking a bicycle with a basket full of mushrooms. She introduced herself as Freja, Ingrid's granddaughter, home from Uppsala for the summer. "Grandma said you'd need saving," she said, though she looked like she'd rather be anywhere else. "She's dramatic. You're fine. The cabin's easy." She paused, examining me with the frankness of someone raised without much urban pretence. "You look tired from driving wrong. We have a saying: 'All roads lead somewhere, but not somewhere you want.' Olle made that up. He makes up many things."

She showed me which mushrooms were worth foraging, which were "for people with death wishes," and admitted she'd only learned the difference after a memorable mistake at nineteen. "Hospital was boring. Now I check with Grandma twice." She left with the same abruptness she'd arrived, calling back that Ingrid would bring cinnamon buns tomorrow, "whether you want or not."

I sat on that questionable stool as darkness finally crept in, sometime after ten, and listened to the particular silence of Swedish forest. Somewhere, Olle was probably telling someone about the Englishman in the meadow. Ingrid was likely planning her bun delivery with military precision. Freja was probably correctly identifying fungi.

I'd arrived embarrassed, lost, making noises like a wounded cat. Yet these strangers had folded me into their narratives without hesitation, with something between amusement and affection. The cabin creaked around me, settling into night. I thought about my satnav, sulking in the glove compartment. Some places, I realised, you don't find by being right. You find them by being confidently wrong, then accepting the help that's offered with a crooked-eyed wooden horse and a warning about depressed eggs.

Tomorrow I'd try the sauna, carefully. Tonight, I simply sat with my incompetence, strangely content.