The sat nav gave up somewhere between Norrkoping and nowhere, which is how I found myself reversing down a gravel track in Ostergotland, convinced I'd spotted a helpful local. Turned out I'd been waving enthusiastically at a particularly lifelike scarecrow. Bjorn, as I've named him, remains one of the more silent companions of my trip to Kimstad.

I was staying in a proper Swedish holiday cottage, one of those red wooden numbers with white trim that looks like it was designed specifically to make British garden sheds weep with inadequacy. The NOVASOL listing had promised tranquillity. What it hadn't mentioned was the welcome committee.

Maj-Britt appeared from the neighbouring property before I'd even killed the engine. Seventy-something, wielding a rake like a sceptre, she informed me in broken English that my parking was "very Swedish" - by which she meant timid, apologetic, and slightly crooked. Within four minutes she'd established my marital status, my mother's occupation, and my inexplicable fear of elk. "You are too loud in your worrying," she declared, before thrusting a Tupperware of pickled herring into my hands. "Eat. Then you will be calm like us."

The herring was surprisingly effective.

The cottage itself sat on the edge of woodland near the Kimstad area, surrounded by nothing much except trees, a small lake visible through the birches, and what I initially took for decorative garden ornaments. These turned out to be Lars's collection of salvaged tractor parts, arranged with what I can only describe as agricultural feng shui. Lars appeared on my second morning, emerging from the treeline with two dogs that had clearly never encountered the concept of personal space.

"You're the English," he stated, rather than asked. "Maj-Britt says you talked to her scarecrow for ten minutes."

In my defence, Bjorn had seemed very attentive.

Lars ran the small boat-hire operation on the nearby water, though "operation" suggests more organisation than the single aluminium dinghy and optimistic signboard implied. He spent twenty minutes explaining why Swedish rowing was philosophically superior to English rowing, a distinction I hadn't previously known existed. "You English row away from things," he observed, with the air of someone diagnosing a condition. "We Swedes row towards the middle. Then we float. This is better."

I found myself nodding along, partly because his logic had a certain watery coherence, partly because his larger dog was now sitting on my foot.

The local shop in Kimstad proper - a ten-minute cycle that Maj-Britt insisted I make, despite my protests about Swedish traffic laws and my questionable balance - was presided over by Gunilla, who had apparently been waiting her entire life for an Englishman to interrogate about tea. "You people drink it all day," she marvelled, ringing up my milk and emergency biscuits. "Like medicine, but for sadness. We have coffee. One cup, strong, in morning. Then we are finished. You are never finished, I think."

She wasn't wrong. I was already planning my fourth cup of the afternoon.

What struck me, cycling back with my provisions bumping in the basket, was how these brief encounters had somehow anchored me more firmly than any landmark could. The landscape of Ostergotland was lovely in that understated, lake-and-forest Swedish way, but it was Maj-Britt's herring diplomacy, Lars's rowing philosophy, and Gunilla's gentle bafflement at British hydration habits that made the place feel inhabited rather than merely visited.

I passed Bjorn on my return, still standing silent sentinel in his field. I didn't wave this time. Some dignity, I felt, had been recovered.

That evening, Lars appeared with a fishing rod he'd "found" in his shed, though the way he presented it suggested long-planned charity towards the English. We sat on the small jetty as the light stretched long across the water, not catching anything worth mentioning, which Lars declared the entire point. "If you catch, you must clean. If you clean, you must cook. Better to not catch, I think. Then you can just sit."

There seemed, in that moment, something profoundly Swedish about this logic. Or perhaps just profoundly Lars.

Maj-Britt brought more Tupperware on my final morning, this time containing something she called "correct bread" and a handwritten note with her daughter's email address in Gothenburg. "You are still too loud," she told me, by way of farewell, "but you are learning."

I drove away more slowly than I'd arrived, partly because of the gravel, partly because I was checking for scarecrows. The sat nav remained confused, but I found I didn't much mind. Some places, I was learning, are better reached through conversation than coordinates.