Surviving desecration

“Until 1951 Saesaare rapids were the largest in Estonia, as well as considered the most beautiful. The rapids were a couple of hundred metres long and 30 metres wide; the water flowed at 3 metres per second. The rapids attracted both nature enthusiasts and anglers.”

So says an interpretation panel titled “Saesaare power station and dam are built”, and it adds the following helpful information: the power station opened on 28 December 1952, at a 54-hectare artificial lake and a 9-metre high dam, and operated until 1970.

"Saesaare is most likely one of Estonia’s best-known examples of how people have redesigned the surrounding landscape with their actions,” the panel concludes modestly.

Not any old landscape. This is among the most spectacular scenery that Estonia can offer to the visitor. Here, the Ahja river, named for the ancient water god, has cut its way through Devonian red-and-cream quartz sandstone strata. Cliffs bordering the river stand today up to 10 metres above the water surface, and make a striking contrast to the green of the forest. In circumnavigating the Kiidjärv on a 12km park service trail, the stories of earlier times come to the mind’s eye, if not necessarily always to life.

Taevaskoja, the sky cave

At one cave - now partly drowned - a group of men visited and saw a small lake with a sacrificial stone in the middle of it, on which a sacrifice was standing (human or animal or food?) The men fled and the cave mouth collapsed. It was also said the roads out of the underworld lead from this place - if you look inside, you may become deaf, blind or insane.

Certainly, WhatsApp stopped working on my phone as I trod the forest paths, nor could I text photos of the surroundings. Magical energy, or is the Devonian sandstone magnetic? The red colour of the rock is mostly the iron oxides haematite and goethite, although some magnetite can be present, rarely in high concentrations.  

At Oosemägi, or hollow hill, the top of a cave reaches 2 metres above the present-day water line where in legend the old devil or Vanapagan used to live, and “from where the clacking of looms was said to have been heard on Thursday nights”.

The trail passes a stream issuing from a cliff face called läte ema, the mother source, where it has been claimed that if you wash your face in the water 40 times, you will look seven years younger. Presumably, this is a remedy for older people, so I am interested, but a collapse of the soft sandstone and a physical barrier and earthworks prevent me sampling crystal-clear water flowing into the Ahja. The interpretation panels will have to do.   

The Devonian period sedimentary rocks (420-340 My before present) are on average 360 metres thick - so laid down at a modest rate on average of 4.5 millimetres per 1,000 years. To drag up some geology, the formation is best known from Scotland and Ireland, as well as Devon, England – where it is called the Old Red Sandstone - also the eastern US and Canada. It recalls an age when Europe and eastern North America were joined as vast, subsiding continental basins of rivers and deserts, prior to geological forces some 140 My later opening up what became the Atlantic ocean.

On occasion, the rocks contain fossils of bony fish; hence this 80-million year time span is known as The Age of Fishes, and also saw the first plants crawling out of the seas and rivers onto dry land, the earliest mosses and liverworts.

Estonia’s sedimentary strata dip very slightly to the south, so travelling from north to south crosses from Ordovician dolostones, and graptolitic oil shales (in the northeast of the country) into flaggy Silurian limestone and dolostone, then into the Devonian where the tap water has a better taste, extending south through the other Baltic states into Belarus and beyond.

I find myself wondering, let's knock out the dam and allow the lake to drain out (carefully), to restore the Ahja to its natural splendour, and the water god to his home.