Draw a horizontal line westward across the globe from the northern coast of Estonia and it will pass through the southernmost tip of Greenland. Hence my surprise when I looked out onto an Estonian beach and saw sunny sand where children were playing while their parents prepared picnics.
My guide, Signe, searches for food along the vegetation between the sand and the pine trees.
“Next month there will be wild strawberries here,” she says.
The sun is shining on the Gulf of Finland, where a white sail appears. An old man is sitting on a log, methodically cutting some driftwood into what looks like it might become a bear. Signe has found wild blackcurrant bushes and is picking the leaves, apparently they are tasty when added to pickled cucumbers. I wander along the coast, stopping to look at an old boathouse and some tracks, possibly from a moose, then watch a group of wading birds tiptoeing around the giant boulders, remnants of the Ice Age, that are scattered along the shore. It could be a scene from Tove Jansson’s luminous idyll of Baltic beach life, The Summer Book.
My journey to Estonia started with a train from London to Vilnius, a bus trip through Latvia and then a bike ride through Estonia to a bear hide. Now I’m walking and riding along the coast of the Gulf of Finland, heading west from the Russian border towards my final destination, the Estonian capital Tallinn.
I feel like the beach is where Estonians reconnect with an older, slower lifestyle, one that also involves a lot of food.
Signe has her blackcurrant leaves, but is watching a piece of ground elder and nettle with suspicion.
“It’s too late for this season. When the shoots are young, I chop them finely with flour and egg and then fry them. Delicious.”
I feel like the beach is where Estonians rediscover their old, peaceful lifestyle, a lifestyle that also involves a lot of food.
Just like Sophia, the main character from The Summer Book, Signe used to come here with her grandmother, who always had an eye for wild seasonal products.
“Spruce buds dipped in chocolate were a favorite,” she says.
The real culinary feast, however, is the berries. Wild strawberries in June are followed by cloudberries, lingonberries and raspberries, and in August come blueberries and cranberries. “But the best berries are not here,” says Signe. “They are in the raised bogs. There is a good one in Viru – we have to go there.”
It’s going to be a swampy, marshy mess, full of mosquitoes, I think. Let’s stick to the coast.
We are in the fishing village of Altja at the eastern end of the Lahemaa National Park, which is formed by four peninsulas and bays. The plan is to explore westwards, so we drive to Käsmu, a small coastal town with a big history.
In the 1880s this was an outpost of the Russian Empire and the Tsar built a customs house next to one of those giant Ice Age boulders. Today it is a museum, but not quite like any other. Inside we find the owner, Aarne Vaik, a white-haired professor, chatting with a Japanese guide. The fame of this small, quirky museum is spreading and I am about to find out why.
“I’m originally from Tartu,” Aarne tells me, with Signe translating. “But when I came here in the 1980s, I became fascinated by the history of the city. It was famous for the number of captains who lived here. There used to be so many ships coming from places like Hull and Newcastle that sterling was legal tender.”
Inspired by the town’s 19th-century past, Aarne had begun collecting maritime memorabilia and artefacts, tracking down everything from captains’ uniforms and letters home to their favourite tins of pipe tobacco (it was the Waverley Virginia). When communism collapsed in the early 1990s, the collection grew impossibly large and Aarne needed a home for it. The customs house had been a Soviet naval outpost. “I marched in and told them I was claiming it to turn into a maritime museum. In those crazy times, they just accepted it and left.”
The founding story somehow reflects the kick-ass eccentricity of both the man and the museum. The first room I enter is draped with dried herbs, oil paintings and maps. There are stacks of antique postcards, letters and books – a beautiful cornucopia of artefacts. There is also a red setter sleeping under a table full of mysterious Lost and founda copper telescope and a half-eaten sandwich – this treasure chest of a house is also home to Aarne and his wife Triin.
Next to us is a room that recreates a 19th-century sea captain’s salon, with original furniture and belongings. What is his most prized exhibit, I ask. He rummages in a corner and pulls out a black, crusty sword. It’s a Viking weapon dug out of a bog by a local farmer.
“It dates back to the 11th century, a period when the Vikings passed through here on their way to Byzantium.”
In another room I meet Triin, who shows me postcards and letters that the old sea captains sent home, and then sepia-toned photos of the women they left behind, sometimes for years. “The women were so heroic and I’m proud that our museum contains their stories too.”
We continue along the coast, exploring villages with beautiful summer huts buried in flower gardens. We have lunch at a seaside restaurant, MerMer, and then explore an abandoned Soviet submarine base at Hara. A top secret facility in its day, we clamber over broken concrete piers and offices, the sea visible through holes in the floor. All the metal was looted after the Russians left in 1991. Now it is a seabird colony and graffiti archive.
Finally Signe makes herself felt. We go to Viru bog, it is too beautiful to miss.
A few miles into the rolling woodland, we park and walk through some trees. Let’s just do it, I think, five minutes should be enough.
We arrive at the start of a boardwalk that zigzags over a large dome of peat moss. I look down on the forest: small, overgrown trees, wrapped in a micro-world of water droplets, green star moss and pink flowers. We reach a lookout tower from which you can see a huge network of ponds, the black mirrors of water catching the puffs of white cloud. Birds and dragonflies fly through them. Back on the ground, Signe shows me how the “land” is just a sponge. “When we come to pick cranberries in August, we take our winter snowshoes with us. Otherwise you’d sink.”
I’m beginning to see the magic that Seamus Heaney captured in his poem Bogland:
The ground itself is kind, black butter / Melts and opens beneath the feet, / Lacks its last definition / Millions of years
Raised peat bogs are formed by the slow accumulation of moss until the entire landscape is raised several metres above the water table and fed solely by rain. Mineral levels then decline and the giant sponge becomes acidic, creating a unique and beautiful environment, one with its own lexicon. Water running off the growing dome creates ridges, or strings, where trees can grow. Between these are flarks, long pools of dark water that drain into a lagg, a wet edge. And in the middle, we discover, is a central pool, the kolk or peat eye, a name that reflects its fathomless, pupil-like darkness.
We reach a lookout tower from where it is possible to see a huge network of ponds, the black mirrors of water catch the puffs of white cloud. Birds and dragonflies move through them
Around the soft, treacherous edges grow carnivorous sundews, the sun glaring off their pink-green jaws. Without nutrients or soil, these plants have evolved to catch insects drawn to the water. Europe was once full of such places, but relentless plundering of peat has made them rare. Swimming in these ponds is a special experience: like diving into a black mirror and becoming part of the bog world.
Today, however, I did it too late. The warm sun has disappeared behind the trees. I lie down on the promenade and look at the small cosmos of the peat up close. I test the surface with my hand. It is soft and wet. My hand slides into it and I wring my fingers through the layers of fibers. Maybe there is still a Viking sword here somewhere. I touch something. It is only a fallen tree trunk, but in my mind it becomes a sword.
In Jansson’s book, nothing much really happens, except for moments like this. In one scene, the girl, Sophia, sees her grandmother picking up bones from the beach and placing them in trees. She wonders what she is doing.
“I play,” says the old woman.
Because Signe didn’t want to come, she had to drag me away.
I spend the night in a coastal cabin, and the next day explore the coast all the way to Tallinn. In the city, I wander through the Telliskivi area, a former Soviet industrial zone now reborn as an arts center, centered around the Fotografiska building, a photography gallery and restaurant. But it’s the narrow alleys of the old town that eventually draw me in, and I stop to sit in the cool calm of the Church of the Holy Spirit, with its galleries and walls beautifully painted by 17th-century artists.
Related: The best beach holidays on the Baltic Sea: where to go for summer, sea and sand
In the evening I return to the sea, and walk to the old port facilities of the Gulf of Finland, the Noblessner, which has been transformed into a stylish area with bars and restaurants. It is a great place to spend an evening, and finish with a walk along the coast (there is a nice maritime museum).
I look out over the Baltic Sea towards Finland, the light of the midsummer evening playing on the water. A chain of terns dances by and I imagine Jansson’s characters, the grandmother and six-year-old Sophia, strolling along looking for things that have washed up on shore, things to play with far into the white summer night.
Kevin was a guest of Visit Estonia and travelled to the Baltic States by train. A four-day EURail or Interrail pass (for UK residents) costs aaround £245 (27 and under: £183, over 60s: £220). In Laheema, Kevin stayed in ööd mirror house forest cabins from £118; in Tallinn, Nunne Boutique Hotel, double rooms from £118.about £65