I have never been so grateful for a wrong turn in my life. There I was, trundling through Vastra Gotaland in a hire car the size of a small bathtub, absolutely convinced I knew exactly where Norra Kedum was. I did not know where Norra Kedum was. My phone had given up around Lidkoeping, apparently offended by my refusal to download an offline map, and I found myself on a gravel track that grew narrower and more accusatory with every metre.

The funny thing about Swedish countryside is how it looks precisely like itself and nothing else. Red wooden houses, fields that roll on forever, and the occasional horse giving you a look of profound disappointment. I passed what I thought was the same barn three times before realising it was, in fact, three separate barns. Classic me.

Then the gravel simply stopped. I had reached someone's farmyard, complete with a dog that did not bark so much as sigh at my incompetence. I wound down the window to apologise to absolutely nobody in particular, and that is when I noticed the path. A proper little footpath, barely wider than a sheep, cutting between two birch trees and heading off towards what looked like water.

Well, I had nothing better to do. I abandoned the car with the enthusiasm of a person who has already ruined their afternoon and followed the path on foot. Mosquitoes found me immediately, naturally. I am basically a walking buffet to anything with six legs. But the trees opened up after perhaps two hundred metres, and there it was: a tiny lake, perfectly still, with a single wooden jetty rotting gently into the water. No signs. No car park. No other human being for what felt like miles.

I sat on that jetty for the better part of an hour. A heron landed at the far end and ignored me with magnificent professionalism. Somewhere in the reeds, something splashed that was probably a fish but that I chose to believe was a miniature Swedish sea monster. The light did that particular Scandinavian thing where everything goes golden and slightly unreal, and I felt the particular shame of a person who has been rushing towards something without noticing what was already there.

I did eventually find Norra Kedum, of course. It turned out to be precisely where the directions had said, which I found rather rude of it. The cottage itself was everything you want from a Swedish holiday let: red paint, white trim, a proper wood-burning stove that I immediately became obsessed with, and a veranda where I spent every morning drinking coffee and pretending I was a local rather than a confused Brit who had got lost in a field.

But here is the thing. That wrong turn became the pattern of my entire stay. I stopped trying so hard to find things and started letting myself wander. The area around Lidkoeping is criss-crossed with these unofficial little paths, farm tracks that lead nowhere official, cycle routes that exist mainly in the imagination of whoever painted the occasional blue sign. I found a clearing where someone had left a bench facing a view of absolutely nothing spectacular, which somehow made it spectacular. I found a stream where I could sit and watch the water move over stones that had been there since before anyone thought to build a cottage anywhere near them.

One afternoon I cycled out with no destination and found myself at what I can only describe as a community garden that had gone slightly feral. Vegetables growing in organised chaos, fruit trees that had clearly been abandoned to their own devices years ago, and a hand-painted sign offering apples for ten kronor with an honesty box. I left twenty and took two apples that were the best I have ever tasted, slightly mealy and absolutely perfect.

The locals, when I encountered them, seemed entirely unbothered by my wandering. An old chap in a tractor waved at me as if me being in the middle of a field was completely normal. A woman walking what appeared to be three identical dogs nodded hello without breaking stride. There was none of that slight tension you sometimes get in tourist spots, that sense that you are being tolerated rather than welcomed. Here, you were simply present, and that was enough.

I think what I loved most was the absence of design. These were not hidden gems curated for discovery, photographed for Instagram, mapped and reviewed and slightly ruined by their own popularity. They were just places that existed because someone had once needed a path to their field, or had fancied a bench in a particular spot, or had planted an orchard and then got on with the rest of their life. The joy was in the accidental nature of it all, the feeling that you had stumbled into something not meant for you specifically, but graciously allowed anyway.

On my final morning, I went back to the lake. The heron was not there, which I chose to interpret as him having a lie-in rather than any commentary on my return visit. I sat on the increasingly rotten jetty and thought about how close I had come to never seeing this place at all, how my stubborn refusal to admit I was lost had somehow delivered me exactly where I needed to be.

I still cannot reliably find Norra Kedum without satnav. But I can find that lake, now. I have learned the landmarks: the sighing dog, the three identical barns, the birch trees that look like they are holding hands. Sometimes getting lost is not a mishap at all. Sometimes it is the only way to find what you were not looking for.