Käsmu

Käsmu had a navigation school and, at its height, was said to have more sea captains per household than any other village in the Russian Empire - hence the name the captains' village. During the Soviet period it sat inside the closed border zone, which froze it in place. The wooden houses along the shore are still there, and so is the peninsula behind them.

What you actually see

• The captains' street - a single row of nineteenth-century houses facing the bay.
• The maritime museum - an idiosyncratic private collection of instruments, models and salvage in one of them.
• The peninsula trail - a loop behind the village through pine forest, past Käsmu lake.
• The boulder shore - erratics the size of small buildings, dropped by the ice and left standing in the shallows.

When to go

June to September has the trail dry and the sea swimmable, just. Winter puts snow on the boulder field and pack ice at the shore, which is the strongest version of the place. Autumn brings storms driving into the bay and an empty village.

Honest expectations

The peninsula loop is around ten kilometres. It is flat but sandy and rooty in places, and it takes longer than the distance suggests.

The village itself is small and quiet, with limited places to eat and no supermarket. This is not somewhere to arrive hungry.

Nearby

Altja and its fishing-village buildings are along the coast east. Palmse manor and Viru bog are both inside the same national park.