When I’d explained the plan, my wife had a question. “Who’s going to go mad first, the kids or us?”

I could see what she meant. On paper, a lake house in Sweden is a terrible idea for children. There’s nothing to do. But that was exactly why I wanted to take them there.

Because we’ve gone activity crazy. We do it at home: quiz an average middle-class child and you’ll find their weekends have become a tightly timetabled round of play centres, drama classes, swimming lessons and parties (always with an entertainer, naturally). And we do it on holiday: every family hotel in the Med now has a kids’ club, with football coaching, circus skills sessions and unbearably enthusiastic play leaders called Zoe.

It’s a frenzy of overstructured overstimulation, a sort of collective ADHD, and I’d had enough of it. What would happen, I wondered, if we took Molly, five, and Conor, three, and plonked them down somewhere with lots of forest, maybe a meadow or two, and a lake. And nothing else. No clubs, no water slides, no interactive displays, nothing organised, laid on, planned out, licensed by Disney or approved by local health-and-safety officials.

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BACKGROUND

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“What will happen,” Jaqui said, “is that first they will go out of their tiny minds, then they’ll drive us out of ours. Let’s at least take some DVDs and the laptop.”

No way. We were going cold turkey – and I’d found just the place to do it.

LAKE HOUSES are a bit of an institution in Sweden. There are thousands of ’em. As the rest of Europe decamps en masse to broiling resorts on the Med, the Swedes while away their surprisingly warm summer months (July temperatures are similar to those in Paris) in the pristine bosom of mother nature. Perfect.

I’d gone for Stenebynas, a remote farmstead with four traditional wooden houses scattered about its 200 acres. It’s a couple of hours’ drive from Gothenburg, through increasingly dense and depopulated forest. The moment I turned off the engine, I wondered what on earth I’d done. The silence hits you immediately, a quiet so intense it sets your ears ringing. This isn’t the middle of nowhere, it’s at nowhere’s outer limits.

Our house was charming, though, and the location was stunning. From the veranda, all we could see was lake, thickly wooded rolling hills, and sky. For an hour or two, the kids ran around excitedly, exploring the meadow, the lake shore, the jetties. Then came the moment I was dreading. Molly’s face took on a quizzical look, and she wandered over.

“Dad,” she said, “what are we going to do here?” I didn’t have the answer prepared. It came to me unbidden, from some deep, dark place in the collective Dad unconscious.

“You’ll have to make your own entertainment.” It had finally happened: I’d turned into my parents. No, my grandparents. Soon, I’d be sending them to bed without supper and putting them up chimneys. Well, it’ll toughen them up, you know.

There was silence for a moment while she chewed this over. She frowned, then opened her mouth and said: “Daaaad ...”

“Bedtime!” Jaqui shouted from the veranda. Saved by the bell. We could all sleep on it. “SHE’S DISAPPEARED,” Jaqui said early the next morning. I rushed to join her in the children’s bedroom. It was true. Her brother lay snoring, but Molly wasn’t there. We ran downstairs. Nobody. Out to the meadow. Empty. As we raced down to the lake shore, I was starting to sweat.

There she was: stark naked in the cool air, chest-deep in tea-coloured water, talking to herself. Hearing us, she looked up.

“I’m a mermaid,” she said. “Watch my dance.”

Anyone who’s not a parent may be forgiven for throwing up at this point. Anyone who is might understand why we sat down by that lake and watched our daughter prance around the reeds in the pale morning light, believing she was a supernatural being, and couldn’t speak.

Over the next few days, we discovered what kids do when they’ve got nothing to do. And it’s this: They splash about. Not in a heated indoor wave pool, but in cold brown water with a bed of reed roots and squelchy mud that oozes between your toes. It has never been cleaned, and is presumably full of fish excrement. They don’t care, and neither do you.

They climb mountains. To us, the rocky outcrops that stud the area (their favourite was no more than 20ft high) might just be convenient lookouts, but to them they’re a cross between Everest and Narnia.

They make friends. The other three houses at Stenebynas all harboured children of various ages, and ours were soon disappearing off with them for longer and longer periods.

They explore. They take risks. They fall over and get stung by nettles and roll down slopes and tumble out of trees and pick blackberries and make daisy chains and have arguments and catch frogs and generally assert their independence. They turn wild, and it’s a joy to watch.

GROWN-UPS turn wild, too, in their way. Like your kids, you have to make your own entertainment here, and it consists of fishing, walking, gathering mushrooms and messing about in boats. You slow down fast. After a few days, I was capable of staring for a full hour, open-mouthed, at the darting pattern of ripples that the breeze etched over the surface of the lake. I was approaching my personal nirvana, a sort of zen idleness.

On the final evening, we took the kids for a long row in the sturdy clinker-built dinghy, then walked slowly back from the jetty across meadows strewn with wild flowers, chatting all the way. I tried to pay full attention, to be in the moment, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking: nobody has a right to be this happy.

We grilled meatballs on the barbecue, got the children to bed, then sat sipping aquavit on the veranda, watching the purple bruise of sunset slowly spread over the sky.

“See?” I said. “Nobody went out of their minds.” “Don’t be so sure,” Jaqui replied. “I heard you mumbling to yourself today. Anyway, what will you write about this place?”

“How beautiful it is, and how it lets children rediscover themselves. And the amazing silence. It’s like a present thing. It’s like the voice of the earth.”

“You sound like an apprentice druid.” “Yes. It’s probably the aquavit talking.”

“Tell it to stop. You’re going disturbingly new age. It has been fantastic for the kids though, better than anything we’ve tried on the Med. So why don’t you just say we had a very good holiday?”

We did. The best ever. Your family will too. Go.

THE SMART GUIDE

What’s the strategy? For the real back-to-nature deal, you want a traditional house, deep in the forest, right by the water. There can be three or four more houses nearby, for kids who want to make friends, but any more than that and it’s a holiday camp – not the same thing at all. The best lake houses: Stenebynas (00 46 531 33168, www.stenebynas. se), in the pretty, hilly, lakey district of Dalsland, is idyllic. Prices run from £800 a week for a two-bedroom house sleeping four, to £1,250 for a seven-bedroom place sleeping nine. Otherwise, there’s a confusing multitude to choose from across the country, so use an expert operator: try Simply Sweden (0845 890 0300, www.simplysweden.co.uk), Scandinavian Holidays (0118 931 4196, www.scandinavianholidays. org.uk), ScanMeridian (020 7554 3530, www.scanmeridian.co.uk) or Taber (01274 875199, www. taberhols.co.uk).

Getting there: fly to Gothenburg from Stansted, Prestwick or Dublin with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com), from Heathrow with SAS (0871 521 2772, www.flysas.com), or from Birmingham or Manchester with City Airline (0870 220 6835, www.cityairline.com). It’s a two-hour drive to Stenebynas: Ebookers (0871 223 5000, www.ebookers.com) has a week’s car hire from £159.

Getting around: don’t. You came for peace and stillness, so be peaceful and still. Make sure your house has a boat, though, just for fun.

The best beach: the one right outside your door. ...

and après-beach: your own veranda, with a glass or two of what you fancy. If you’re expecting nightlife, you haven’t been paying attention. Smart thinking: talking of booze, bring your own. The government alcohol shops are miserable, overpriced and never open when you want them to be.

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