Another on my list of places that I didn’t mean to go to

I was doing fine until I found the gravestone at the side of the path.

Well, sort of fine. The day after the savage attack by the brutal morning mosquitos, my legs were so covered in bites that the children of Haapsalu pointed and stared as I walked by. However, I was still determined to brave the forest again and find the stone that had tipped over Peter the Great’s carriage.

I smothered myself in hydrocortisone cream and aloe vera and antihistamines and then, once I could no longer feel my skin, I sprayed the strongest concentration of DEET that I could purchase without a military requisition. But enveloped in the protective cloud of bug spray so noxious that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the same room as myself, I was ready to follow the 5km circular forest walk and be back in an hour to meet our friends in town.

It seemed to have worked. As I paused at the same stunning orchid growing tall through the forest undergrowth, a single mosquito buzzed toward me and then, wrinkling its nose, turned away in disgust.

I was about halfway through the 5km walk when I noticed the gravestone.

Based on the engraved text, I guess I was not supposed to think that it was a gravestone. But I can’t see what other conclusion anyone would come to: it is a dark grey marble headstone with a cross and a date and a plastic white rose stabbed into the ground at its base. It certainly seemed to me that someone had died here.

The text actually says something like: 24 February 1884: A biblical baptism took place here in the Ungru River, which laid the foundation for the first Baptist church in Estonia.

There are so many questions, for example why someone used a marble headstone as a memorial and who, over a century later, would leave a plastic white rose and why were people baptising in the river if they didn’t have a Baptist church yet?

But in my mind, at that moment, the overwhelming question was “Why have I heard of the Ungru river?”

To be honest, it’s more a stream than a river, just three kilometres long running through the the Paralepa forest from Kiltsi village on the outskirts of Haapsalu. The reason that it sounded familiar was that I had read about Ungru manor: the place that Peter the Great was leaving when his carriage hit the rock which I still had not seen.

The manor and the river were named after the same people, Baltic German nobility known as the Ungru-Sternbergs.

While looking this up, I realised that if I followed the stream south, I would end up at Ungru Manor, probably tracing the actual steps of Peter the Great before he ran into the rock. Never mind that I hadn’t found the rock yet. According to Google Maps, Ungru Manor was just south of the Paralepa forest that I was currently traipsing through and I could walk there in 36 minutes.

I’m aware that I have some issues with sticking to a simple plan like “find the stone and then meet back at the hotel” so I did what any sensible person would do: I asked Twitter for advice.

The vast majority were clearly in favour of my abandoning the trail and finding the ruins of Ungru manor. More importantly, Cliff agreed that rather than meeting me at the hotel, he would be happy to drive to the manor house and meet me there. He seemed not the least bit surprised that I had gone the wrong way and would need finding.

If you were paying attention to me earlier, you already know that Haapsalu started as a Roman Catholic diocese at the end of the 13th century. However, in 1558, Ivan the Terrible invaded from Russia, starting the Livonian War. Somehow it all went terribly wrong for everyone involved and in the end, most of Livonia accepted Polish rule but Northern Estonia, including Haapsalu, swore loyalty to the Swedish king. This is interesting because here we see the concept of Estonia as a place appearing: Estonia was used to mean the north and west land held by the Swedes while Livonia referred to the Polish-controlled southern land. Not that any of it was Estonian. Rather belligerently, Sweden considered Estonia to be clearly Swedish while Livonia was cruelly occupied by the Poles. They conquered the southern territory in the Polish-Swedish war, gaining what is now southern Estonia and northern Latvia, in 1629.

Getting back to the subject at hand, it was that same year, 1629, that the Swedish king gave a big chunk of land to Otto von Ungern-Sternberg, presumably for his efforts in the war.

Otto built a manor house there, the first Ungru manor, but although the landscape around the house was described as one of the most beautiful parks in the whole of Estonia, the baroque manor house was rather dismissively described as “not as remarkable.”

The fact that I can find all this out while following a rough path through a tiny forest on the coast will never cease to amaze me. One of the wonderful things about Estonia is that they take great pride in ensuring that everyone, everywhere has internet coverage, even when you are in the middle of nowhere. One of the wonderful things about Wikipedia these days is that it has moved far beyond its English-only roots, which meant that by switching language on the Ungru Manor page from English to Estonian to German, I found three completely different sets of information, each accompanied by a new collection of references for me to find out more.

I continued to read about the manor until I tripped over a snaking tree root and splattered into the dust and mud, after which I sadly accepted that, despite the claims that women are fantastic multi-taskers, I needed to focus all of my attention on walking.

Google recommended a bike path which I followed, swatting away the occasional horse fly unimpressed by the toxic cloud surrounding me. I reached a road junction where my bicycle path carried on straight, with a large warning sign in the distance, and I needed to turn left, following the road to the manor. I couldn’t quite read the sign, which was in Estonian and Russian, so I had no idea what was being warned against. I walked towards it with my phone out ready to translate.

A woman on a bicycle stopped and called out to me in rapid Estonian. I stopped and looked at her and then back at the sign. She spoke again, louder and more aggressively, most unlike an Estonian. In my experience, most Estonians will happily help you if you ask, but they are unlikely to initiate a conversation or interfere with what you are doing, even if they think you (by which I mean me) are about to do something monumentally stupid. They might stop to watch, because who doesn’t enjoy watching a tourist making a fool of herself, but they don’t interfere.

I stopped and said in my best Estonian, “I don’t speak Estonian.”

She frowned. I frowned. I asked if she spoke English or German and she said no. She asked if I spoke Russian and I said no. We had now exhausted the possibilities.

I glanced towards the sign, clearly a warning sign and what looked like might be a penalty of €3,400 euros, which seemed an oddly specific number. She spoke again, clearly agitated and willing me to understand by sheer force of will.

I did understand, really. It was quite clear she was telling me not to go that way. “I just want to look at the sign,” was beyond what I could say in Estonian. I didn’t just want to walk away from her. I gave up and went for the easy way out. “Kus on Ungru mõis?” Where is Ungru manor?

She smiled with relief and pointed left on the road. I shoved my phone into my pocket and started on my way while she, clearly delighted that she had saved me from going the wrong way, got back on her bike and rode towards the forest that I had left behind.

Google’s estimate was somewhat optimistic. I had trudged along the potholed country road for almost an hour without any signs of life before I saw a grey building rising towards the perfect blue sky in the distance. It looked like a Hollywood set, limestone bricks forming a beautiful frame of a neo-baroque house, if you can call something missing half of the walls and the roof as a house.

This was the second Ungru manor, built by Count Ewald Adam Gustav Paul Constantin von Ungern-Sternberg, whom I will just call Ewald for short. I’m sure he won’t mind. The manor house was never finished although there are two versions why not: one is that Ewald ran out of the money and the other, described as a heart-breaking romance, is more interesting, even if I violently disagree with the romantic bit.

In 1890, young Ewald was visiting Merseburg Castle in Germany when he fell madly in love with the local lord’s daughter. He proposed to her and the story goes that she explained sadly that she could not marry him, as she loved her family home and wished to live the rest of her life there.

Now, it seems to me that this was an exceedingly polite way of telling him to bugger off. Apparently, he didn’t take the hint. Instead, he promised her that he would build a replica of the castle for her in Estonia and they could live there together happily-ever-after.

She said, well, OK, then, he should go and build the castle and talk to her again when it was finished.

Apparently taking this as wild enthusiasm for the idea, Ewald hired Estonian master builders who agreed that they could produce a near copy of Merseburg Castle from local materials. They started work in 1893 on what sounds like a remarkable design, with a southwestern tower to hold the entrance and a staircase leading to a reception floor with a dining hall, a large ballroom and adjacent “play rooms” with which to entertain the neighbouring Baltic German nobility, who owned most of the land of Estonia at that time.

I stood at that fantastic entrance which was now a pile of rubble and broken brickwork with modern supports to keep the whole thing from tumbling down. As I stepped through, I was surrounded by dark butterflies and jagged grass growing through the uneven floor. A pile of blankets rotted in the corner.

Once upon a time, exquisite limestone brickwork rose four stories above me leading to a baroque tower copied from the tower of the still-standing St Nicholas Church in Tallinn, although history is silent on whether Ewald had approved this deviation from the Merseberg designs he’d given the builders. Maybe they thought that she wouldn’t notice.

It didn’t matter anyway. The building works took longer than expected, as these things almost always do, and in the end, the young woman’s desire to live out her life in her father’s castle turned out to be prophetic. She died in Merseburg in 1899 when Ungru manor was almost complete. No version of the story includes what she died of so I prefer to think she faked her own death rather than move to Estonia to live in a castle with the wrong tower on top.

We don’t hear much about Ewald after that, presumably devastated by the loss of the woman he seemed sure would be convinced by his fairy tale castle to come live with him forever. All we really know, though, is he never finished the construction of the manor house and he never married. The next clear reference to Ewald is 11 years later when, at the age of 45, he fell ill during a trip to St. Petersburg and died there.

His dying wish was for his corpse to be taken to Haapsalu by train and then carried into the manor, so that he could spend at least one night there. The following day, his body was taken to the Estonian island of Hiiumaa where he was buried in his family’s burial plot.

The manor house, which had never had windows or doors or much of an interior, fell into disrepair. In 1919, Estonia declared independence and the house and lands were claimed from the Ungern-Sternberg family as a part of the Estonian land reform. Estonia, in the process of stabilising after independence, had better things to worry about and the manor house continued to crumble under new management.

No one paid it much attention until the second world war, when the Soviets occupied Estonia and decided that actually, it would be quite useful to have an airfield near Haapsalu. The military, aided by local people who were spurred on by the rumours of noble treasure hidden in the ruined manor house, carried away the expensive limestone bricks to build a runway at the nearby airfield.

By the 1960s, both the manor house and the airfield were falling to pieces. The airport commander needed to fix and fill the runway and where better to find supplies, he thought, than the nearby ruins which had already been used for the runway. Almost a third of the manor house walls were demolished before local authorities managed to stop the demolition work, with tactics that included “using acquaintances and difficult roads”. Peer pressure and pot holes seem to have done the trick and the remaining walls were left in piece.

Those walls have stood for over a hundred years, looking serene and haunted on the perfectly manicured green lawn. They now offered me shelter from the bright summer sunshine as I sat on a pile of rubble and enjoyed the cool breeze, ignoring the texts from Cliff asking where the hell was I. In the distance, a limestone bridge arched over Ungru river (stream!), marking the edge of the property. It looked like a place where one could believe in love, even if I still think Ewald was as dumb as two limestone bricks. It looked like heartbreak.

Cliff pulled up to meet me a few minutes later. “Honestly,” I told him, “I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to spend the rest of their lives in Estonia finding unexpected places.” He cruelly ignored my entreaties to find the airfield with a runway made from a manor house and drove back to Haapsalu where our friends were waiting for us with a cold bottle of white wine and a polite interest in my ramblings about ruined country estates and men who couldn’t take a hint.

I’ll be back, I promised myself as we loaded the car for the drive east back to Tallinn. Not just because Haapsalu is both charming and has a wine bar to die for, but because now it seemed that a carriage-tipping rock and an entire airfield had evaded me. I couldn’t take this lying down.