The satnav gave up on us just outside Blentarp, which I suppose should have been our first warning. We'd been driving through Skane for the better part of three hours, my partner doing that very British thing of refusing to admit we were lost, while I clutched a printed map like some kind of 19th-century explorer. "It's just round this bend," he'd say, for the seventh time. It wasn't round that bend. It wasn't round the next twelve bends either. The mishap came when we finally spotted what we thought was our turn, only to find ourselves bumping down a farm track towards a very surprised-looking herd of cows. A farmer emerged from a barn, wiping his hands on his overalls, and I wound down the window with what I hoped was an apologetic smile.

"You're looking for the holiday house?" he said, before we'd even spoken. His English was better than mine, which immediately put me at a disadvantage. "The English couple in the blue Volvo. Gunilla said you'd be lost by now." He said this with the satisfied air of a man whose predictions have come good, then pointed us back the way we'd come with instructions involving a red postbox and something he called "the bend where Erik crashed his tractor in 1987." We found it, eventually, though I still couldn't tell you how.

The property itself sat at the end of a gravel lane, a proper Skane farmhouse with white walls and that distinctive dark timber framing that makes you feel like you've wandered into a children's book illustration. Before we'd even cut the engine, a woman appeared from the neighbouring cottage, wiping flour from her forearms. This was Gunilla, who managed the property and who, I would learn, knew absolutely everything about absolutely everyone within a ten-mile radius.

"You're late," she said, not unkindly. "I told Lars you'd get lost at the cow field." Lars, presumably, was our farmer friend. She handed us a key and a Tupperware container still warm from her oven. "Apple cake. You'll want it. The shops are shut tomorrow and you've got that face people make when they haven't eaten properly." I wasn't sure whether to be grateful or slightly offended, but the cake smelled incredible so I chose grateful.

She showed us round with the efficiency of someone who'd done this a thousand times, pointing out the wood-burning stove, the slightly temperamental shower, and the garden chairs that "wobble a bit but won't kill you." Then she paused at the kitchen window, looking out towards the fields. "You should walk to the lake tomorrow. Not the big one, the small one. The big one's for tourists. The small one's where Ingrid swims with her dogs every morning at six, rain or shine. She's eighty-four. Used to be a competitive diver, back when that meant something."

I asked if Ingrid might mind company, and Gunilla laughed, a proper hearty sound. "Mind? She'll talk your ear off given half a chance. Just don't mention the Copenhagen ferry. She had a disagreement with a Danish man on it in 1972 and she's still holding the grudge."

True to her word, we found Ingrid the next morning, though "found" suggests more intentionality than was involved. We'd wandered down a lane Gunilla had described as "where the badger crosses, if you're lucky," and there she was, emerging from the water in a swimming cap decorated with rubber flowers, two damp and enthusiastic spaniels circling her ankles. She fixed us with bright blue eyes and demanded to know if we were the English who'd got lost at Lars's cows.

Word travels fast in Blentarp, apparently faster than the internet.

She invited us back to her cottage for coffee, which turned out to be a ritual of military precision. The cups were from a set she'd won in a church raffle in 1961. The biscuits were homemade, "though the recipe's not mine, it's from a woman in Sjoebo who stole it from her mother-in-law, so I suppose it's communal property now." She talked us through the neighbourhood with the thoroughness of a historian and the bias of a devoted partisan. Lars was "decent enough for a farmer, though his wife does all the actual thinking." Gunilla was "a treasure, but never ask her about her first husband unless you've got three hours spare." The man who ran the petrol station in Sjoebo was "not to be trusted with directions, or indeed with anything requiring patience."

What struck me, sitting in her sunlit kitchen with its slightly crooked shelves and overwhelming collection of ceramic cats, was how completely we'd stumbled into something. This wasn't the Sweden of design magazines and city breaks. This was something smaller, more particular, more gently ridiculous. Ingrid's stories looped and tangled, each person connected to every other person by some ancient slight or unexpected kindness, the whole thing held together by nothing more than proximity and persistence.

We stayed a week. By day three, the man at the petrol station was waving us through without charge for our morning papers, "because you're Ingrid's English now, and she hasn't had new people to talk about since the Germans in 2019, and they only spoke three words of Swedish so it hardly counted." By day five, Lars had shown us his barn, his vintage tractor collection, and a photograph of himself as a child sitting on a pig. By our final morning, Gunilla had left another cake, this one wrapped in foil with a note saying "for the journey, though you'll probably eat it before you reach the motorway, you look the type."

We did eat it before the motorway. We got slightly lost again finding it, because some things become tradition whether you plan them or not. As I sat in the passenger seat, crumbs on my lap and my partner muttering about road signs, I thought about Ingrid in her rubber-flowered cap, about Gunilla's efficient kindness, about Lars and his satisfied predictions. I'd come to Skane expecting countryside and quiet, and found instead this dense, generous, faintly absurd web of people who'd simply decided we were worth the bother.

The satnav worked fine on the way back, which felt almost like a disappointment. Some things, I think, are better found by accident, with the help of strangers who've known each other forever and who treat your getting lost as the most natural thing in the world, because in their world, everything and everyone eventually finds their way to where they need to be.