Rannarada

The first ice along the shore

There is a morning every year when the sea along Pirita beach stops moving at the edges. It is not real ice yet, more a grey slush that rocks very slowly with the swell and makes a soft hissing sound against the sand. If the wind stays in the east for a few days it thickens into plates, and the plates push up onto the beach in small crooked piles that look like broken crockery.

I walked from the river mouth towards the old convent ruins just after eight, which in November means just after sunrise. The light was very low and very yellow, and the only other people out were dog walkers and one man in a wetsuit who went into the water, stood there for about a minute with his arms folded, and came out again looking entirely satisfied. Nobody remarked on it.

By the afternoon the wind had turned and the slush was gone. That is how it goes for most of the late autumn: the sea tries a few times before it decides.

Boardwalk over the bog

Estonia is about a fifth bog, and the easiest way to understand what that means is to walk out onto one on a duckboard path. The trees thin out within a few hundred metres and become small crooked pines, knee high or less, growing very slowly in the wet moss. Then even those stop, and there is only the open bog: low hummocks of sphagnum in red, ochre and green, dark pools of water that reflect the sky perfectly, and a horizon that seems further away than it should be.

The boardwalk is two planks wide and in places it floats rather than rests on anything. You learn quickly to keep to the middle. We walked a loop of about six kilometres with a stop on the wooden watchtower, which gives a view over three or four separate bogs and the forest islands between them. Cranberries were ripe on the moss right beside the planks, small and hard and very sour, and we picked a cupful without stepping off the path.

On the way back a light mist came up off the pools. It was not cold, but the quiet out there is strange enough that we both found ourselves speaking in low voices without having agreed to.

Juniper and limestone

The north coast west of Tallinn is edged with a limestone cliff, the klint, which runs along the shore for a long way and drops to the sea in steps of grey and yellow rock. At Pakri it is high enough to make you careful near the edge. The rock is soft and layered, and after storms there are fresh pieces lying on the beach below, full of small fossil shells that look like fingernails.

Above the cliff the land is flat and open, with juniper bushes scattered over thin grass. Juniper grows in shapes that seem deliberate from a distance: columns, cones, low spreading cushions. Up close it smells sharply of resin and gin, and the berries take two or three years to ripen, so on one bush you find green, half blue and fully blue berries all at once.

We sat on the edge of the old lighthouse yard and ate rye bread with smoked fish while the wind pushed long lines of white water against the foot of the cliff. Somewhere below us a group of eiders rode the swell without any apparent effort.

The ferry to a small island

The boat to Prangli leaves from a small harbour east of the city and takes about an hour. It carries locals with shopping bags, a few summer people with bicycles, a crate of bread for the island shop, and on that day one very calm goat in the back of a pickup.

The island is small enough to cross on foot in an afternoon. There are three villages, a wooden church, sandy tracks through pine forest, and a shoreline that changes every few hundred metres from rocks to reeds to fine white sand. Most of the houses are old fishermen's houses, painted in faded red and blue, with nets still hanging on poles in some of the yards.

We swam from a stony beach on the north side where we could see nobody at all in either direction. The water was warm at the surface and suddenly cold half a metre down, the way the Baltic often is in late summer. The last boat back was at six, and we were on the pier early, as everyone seems to be: missing it would mean a night on the island, which is not the worst thing that could happen.

White nights

Around midsummer the sun sets in Tallinn a little before half past ten and rises again before four, and in between it never properly gets dark. The sky in the north stays pale green and pink all night, and you can read outside at midnight if you are stubborn about it.

Kakumäe is a quiet bay on the west side of the city, with a small beach, a few old pines and a view across the water to the towers of the old town. On clear June evenings people come down with blankets and thermoses and simply sit there, watching the light move slowly along the horizon from west to north to east without ever disappearing. Children run about long after any reasonable bedtime. Nobody seems to mind.

Midsummer Eve, Jaanipäev, is the real high point: bonfires on beaches and in village fields, sausages, beer, singing, and the old tradition of looking for a fern flower in the forest that does not exist. We did not find one. We did find a bonfire on the beach with a man playing the accordion very badly and very happily, which was better.

A smoke sauna in the south

The smoke sauna, savusaun, has no chimney. A large stone stove is heated for several hours with the door half open, and the smoke fills the room and leaves through small gaps under the roof. When the stones are hot enough the fire is allowed to die, the room is aired, the soot is washed from the benches, and then, finally, you go in.

The heat is softer than in an ordinary sauna and somehow deeper. The walls are black and smell of old wood smoke, the light comes in through one small window, and the steam from the stones rolls down very slowly. Our host had birch whisks soaking in a bucket, made last summer and dried, and showed us how to use them without hurting anyone.

Between rounds we walked out barefoot into the snow and stood in the dark yard steaming, looking at the stars over the forest. Then back inside. The whole evening took about five hours and nobody looked at a phone once.

The geese come back

The west coast of Estonia is one of the great resting places for migrating birds, and in spring the shallow bays and coastal meadows around Matsalu fill with geese, swans and ducks on their way north. You hear them before you see them: a constant low clamour from the water, rising suddenly into a roar when something startles a flock and several thousand birds take off at once.

We spent a cold, bright day moving between the bird towers along the bay. From the top of the tallest one the reed beds stretched out for kilometres, pale gold from last year, with lines of open water cutting through them. Barnacle geese were feeding on the meadows in tight grey groups. A pair of white-tailed eagles sat on a dead tree near the shore for most of an hour, doing nothing at all.

By May the flocks have mostly gone on to the Arctic, and the meadows go quiet again until autumn.

Rye bread, properly

Estonian black bread, leib, is dense, dark and slightly sour, made with rye and a sourdough starter that some families have kept going for decades. It is eaten with almost everything: butter and salt, smoked fish, cheese, soup, or simply on its own with a cup of tea in the evening.

A neighbour gave us a spoonful of her starter in a jar, with handwritten instructions that were mostly about patience. The dough is mixed in the evening and left in a warm place overnight, then more flour goes in the next morning, then it rises again, then it bakes slowly for a long time. The first loaf was too dense even by the standards of rye bread. The third one was good.

The custom we like best is the small piece of dough kept back from each batch to start the next one. In the old days the bread trough was treated with real respect and was never left empty. It is easy to see why: it is the one thing in the kitchen that is genuinely alive.

Waterfall in the frost

The Keila river drops about six metres over the limestone edge before it reaches the sea, and in a hard frost the waterfall half freezes. The spray coats the trees on the banks with ice, the edges of the fall grow great swollen columns of white, and the water in the middle keeps pouring through a dark channel that never quite closes.

There is a manor house in the park nearby, restored a few years ago, and a path that follows the river down through old trees to the sea. We walked it in minus fourteen with the sun out and the snow squeaking underfoot. At the mouth of the river the sea was frozen white as far as we could see, with a few dark lines where the ice had cracked and closed again.

We stopped at the small café by the manor on the way back for hot blackcurrant juice, which seems to be the drink of choice on days like this. It was exactly right.

Mushrooms after rain

After a wet week in early September the forests south of the city fill on Saturday mornings with cars parked along the gravel roads, and with people walking slowly with baskets and knives. Mushroom picking here is less a hobby than a seasonal habit, like cleaning windows in spring.

We went with a friend who knows the forest well and who, like all serious pickers, will not say exactly where the good places are. We found chanterelles in the moss under spruces, a few ceps by the edge of a clearing, and a great many russulas in every colour, of which he allowed us to keep only some. Anything he did not recognise with complete certainty went back on the ground.

In the evening the chanterelles were fried with onions and a little cream and eaten with new potatoes and dill. The rest were cleaned, sliced and dried on threads above the stove, where they will smell of autumn for the rest of the winter.

Walking the old town early

The old town of Tallinn is busy for most of the day and most of the year, but before eight on a December morning it belongs to delivery vans, street sweepers and people going to work. The streets are still dark, the lamps are on, and the snow on the cobbles has not yet been trodden flat.

We walked up the narrow lane to the upper town and out to one of the viewing platforms, where the roofs of the lower town spread out below in red and white, with church spires sticking up through a thin layer of chimney smoke. Out beyond the harbour the ferries to Helsinki were lit up like small buildings, waiting.

The Christmas market in the town hall square opens later in the morning, and by noon the smell of mulled wine and roasted almonds reaches several streets away. But the best of it, for us, is the half hour before, when the stalls are closed and the square is empty and quiet under the big tree.

Naissaar by bicycle

Naissaar lies in the bay just north of Tallinn, close enough to see from the city on a clear day, and for most of the twentieth century it was a closed military island. Today it is a nature reserve, mostly forest, with a few summer houses, a small harbour, and a network of old narrow-gauge railway lines slowly being swallowed by moss.

We took bicycles over on the summer boat and rode the forest roads around the island in about four hours, with long stops. There are abandoned concrete buildings in the forest, gun positions facing the sea, a lighthouse on the northern tip and long empty beaches of fine pale sand. In the shade under the pines the air smelled of resin and warm needles.

On the way back we waited for the boat on the pier with a small group of other cyclists, all of us sunburnt and slightly tired. The city skyline came closer slowly across the flat calm water, and the island behind us went back to being a dark line on the horizon.

Blueberries on the old road

Lahemaa is the big national park east of Tallinn: forest, coast, bogs, old fishing villages and a scattering of manor houses with long avenues of lime trees. In July the forest floor under the pines turns blue with berries, and the old forest roads become the easiest places to pick, because the light reaches the ground there and the bushes grow thick.

We picked for two hours along a grass-grown road that once led to a farm that is no longer there. Only the foundation stones and a lilac bush remain, which is how you recognise most abandoned farmsteads in this country: wherever there is a lilac in the middle of a forest, somebody once lived. Our fingers and mouths were purple for the rest of the day.

In the evening we made a quick pie with a crust of butter, flour and sour cream, the kind that every grandmother here seems to bake without a recipe. It was gone within the hour.

Storm on the north coast

Käsmu is an old captains' village on a narrow peninsula, with wooden houses in big gardens, a small maritime museum in a former coast guard building, and a shore covered with enormous boulders left behind by the ice. Some of them are the size of a small house. Children climb them in summer. In an autumn storm nobody does.

We arrived on a day when a gale was blowing straight in from the north. The sea was brown with stirred-up sand and broke over the outer boulders in tall white fountains, and the spray reached the pine trees at the edge of the forest. Walking along the shore path meant leaning into the wind at an angle that felt slightly ridiculous.

The lights came on early in the village, and through the windows we could see people sitting at kitchen tables with tea, looking out at the weather with the mild interest of those who have seen a great many storms. We drove home slowly through the forest with branches falling on the road.

Skiing on the meadow

When the snow lies properly for a few weeks, the meadows and forest paths on the southern edge of the city become ski tracks. Someone with a small snowmobile and a track setter goes out early in the morning, and by nine the first skiers are already gliding through the pine woods in neat double lines.

Cross-country skiing is less a sport here than a way of moving about in winter. You see small children on skis that are too long for them, pensioners with perfect technique, and people skiing to the shop with a backpack. On weekend mornings the car parks by the trails are full and the air smells of ski wax and frozen pine.

We did a slow ten kilometres with a stop at a lean-to where somebody had left a thermos of tea with a sign saying "help yourself". We did, and left a few coins in the tin beside it.

The quarry lake

West of the city there is an old limestone quarry that flooded when the pumps were switched off, and it is now a lake of remarkably clear blue-green water beside a tall grey hill of spoil. Parts of the old prison buildings that once stood by the quarry are still in the water, half sunk, with their walls and windows visible a few metres below the surface.

On hot August days it is a popular place to swim, and the water is much warmer than the sea. We went on a weekday morning when it was nearly empty, swam across to the far side and back, and then climbed the spoil hill for the view. From the top you can see the flat green country stretching away in every direction, with the dark line of the forest and, on very clear days, a thin pale strip of sea far to the north.

Coming down the loose slope is harder than going up. We took it slowly, sideways, like everyone else.

Notes on the year

• The weather on the coast changes faster than any forecast. Take a layer more than you think you need, even in July.
• Ticks are common in long grass and forest edges from April to October. Check after every walk.
• Forest fire warnings in dry summers are taken seriously, and lighting fires outside marked places can be forbidden. Check before you go.
• Sea ice is never safe just because other people are standing on it.
• Most hiking trails and campsites in the state forests are free, well kept and quiet. Leave them as you found them.
• Midsummer, the first snow and the first ice are the three days of the year when everyone you meet will want to talk about the weather.