I have always believed that the best holidays happen when you stop looking at your phone and start looking around you, which is why I found myself driving through Skane with a dead sat nav, a crumpled paper map, and the growing suspicion that I had just missed my turning for the third time. The mishap, if you can call it that, was entirely my own fault. I had been so busy marvelling at the flat, golden fields rolling past the window that I failed to notice the tiny sign for Asljunga until it was a distant speck in my rear-view mirror. By the time I turned round and found the lane, I was forty minutes late, slightly sweaty, and absolutely convinced the owner would think I was the sort of person who gets lost in their own garden shed.

The property itself, when I finally arrived, was one of those traditional Swedish cottages that looks like it has grown organically out of the landscape rather than been built on top of it. Red wooden walls, white trim, a proper tiled stove inside that I immediately decided would be my best friend come evening. But here is the thing about getting lost on those narrow Skane lanes. You start noticing things you would never have found otherwise.

That first afternoon, rather than unpacking properly like a sensible person, I went for what I intended to be a quick wander to stretch my legs after the drive. I took a path that looked like it led somewhere purposeful, which of course meant it led nowhere of the sort. Within ten minutes I was surrounded by beech woodland, utterly disoriented, and weirdly content about it. The path dwindled to a track, then to something that was basically two flattened lines of grass between the trees. I pushed on because turning back felt like admitting defeat, and because the light filtering through the leaves was doing something genuinely magical.

That is how I stumbled across the first of my accidental discoveries. A small clearing with a single wooden bench, clearly placed there by someone local who knew exactly where to sit and think. No sign, no information board, just a view across a shallow valley of mixed farmland and forest that looked like it had not changed in a hundred years. I sat there for half an hour doing absolutely nothing productive, which I consider one of the great achievements of my entire trip.

The getting lost became something of a theme after that. Each morning I would set out with vague intentions, usually involving finding a particular village or supposedly notable viewpoint, and each morning I would somehow end up somewhere else entirely. A tiny lake I never found the name of, where I watched a heron stand motionless for so long I started to worry about it. An abandoned orchard, apples rotting sweetly on the ground, where someone had clearly once kept bees and left behind a single weathered hive. A farm shop that appeared at the end of a track I took thinking it was a shortcut, selling the most extraordinary cheese I have ever tasted, made by a woman who spoke about four words of English and communicated entirely through enthusiastic gestures and samples.

What struck me about Skane, once I stopped trying to navigate it properly, was how much it rewards the aimless. The landscape is not dramatic in the way that demands your attention with mountains or cliffs. It is subtle, working on you slowly, revealing itself in the particular quality of light across a field of rapeseed, or the way a village church tower appears above the trees exactly when you have stopped expecting anything to appear at all.

By my fourth day, I had abandoned the map entirely. I would simply drive or walk until something looked interesting, then investigate. This is how I found the ruined windmill, or rather what was left of it, standing alone in a field like a forgotten punctuation mark. No heritage trail led to it, no plaque explained its history. It was just there, being quietly magnificent, and because I had got lost trying to find a recommended bakery in a nearby town, I was there too.

The gentle self-reflection came on my final evening, walking back to the cottage after another directionless afternoon. I realised that my whole approach to holidays, normally so planned and optimised and thoroughly researched, had been completely upended by one missed turning and a dead battery. And I was genuinely grateful for it. There is something about being slightly lost that strips away the performance of tourism, the checking of boxes, the need to have seen the right things in the right order. You simply experience what is in front of you, which in Skane is often something quietly extraordinary that no guidebook has bothered to mention.

I left Asljunga with no photographs of famous landmarks, no ticked-off sights, and absolutely no idea where half the places I visited actually were. I have never been more satisfied with a holiday in my life.