‘I stepped off the boardwalk into the mire’

Lifelong ‘mud magnet’ Xenia Taliotis puts bog walking to the test in the wilds of Estonia’s Soomaa National Park It’s easy to think of a bog as a messy carpet on which to run riot, but it’s a fragile ecosystem

‘Mud, mud, glorious mud/ There’s nothing quite like it for cooling the blood/So follow me, follow/Down to the hollow/ And there let us wallow in glorious mud.” I’ve always loved The Hippopotamus Song by Flanders and Swann, not least because I’ve been a mud magnet all my life. Growing up, if I went outdoors I would return home with my shoes and shins caked in the stuff. No matter that all I’d done was wander down the high street.

So how marvellous that there is an activity combining my love of walking and the outdoors with my inability to remain neat and tidy: bog walking through the squelchy, peaty, wet forest of Soomaa National Park in Estonia sounded like my perfect break.

I arrived raring to wallow at the remote and isolated centre run by Karuskose, an outdoor adventure specialist, on the banks of the Raudna River. But before I could do that, said Rene Valner – who runs the camp with his partner Mariell Jussi – I first had to meet and get to know Soomaa.

So we went canoeing along the Raudna. As we paddled along marshy waterways, passing beaver dams and concealed creeks, counting kingfishers and collecting hazelnuts as we went, Rene did the introductions.

Soomaa, meaning “land of the bogs”, is one of Europe’s last undisturbed wildernesses, a vast expanse swathed with ancient spruce and birch forests, wetlands, floodplain grasslands, meadows, rivers and sea. It has five seasons, the fifth being high water when the ice melts and the rivers rise to claim everything in their path. This is a place of mystery and magic, home to wolves, elks, boars, bears and more.

The next day, Rene and I set off early so we could be at Kuresoo – the largest, and many would say the best, of Soomaa’s four enormous peat bogs – before sunrise. Locals often liken the way this raised bog grew out of the earth to bread dough rising. When its crust cracked, the crevices filled with water and became lakes.

Our approach was along boardwalks, and we walked in twilight. Watching the landscape emerge was like watching a photograph develop. With every step, I saw more – a tree stretching its spindly branches towards me, a lake glistening its warning not to proceed.

Finally, we reached a point where we could step off the boardwalk and into the mire. I clipped on my bog shoes and was so glad they were not the old wooden ones I had expected to wear but modern, lightweight equivalents. They are much like snow shoes – spiked on the underside with a fixed harness for the ball of the foot, allowing the heel free movement – and do the same job, stopping you sinking.

We were ready to go and Rene held me steady while I found my balance. It was how I imagine walking on the moon must feel, although what was putting a spring in my step was the elastic energy of the peat moss (sphagnum) rather than the absence of gravity. I loved the buoyancy, the novelty and euphoria that comes from being amid so much nature and for a second wanted to clodhop my way across the plain – but that’s not what this is about.

It’s easy to think of the bog as a mossy carpet on which you can run riot, but of course it is a vibrant ecosystem – and a fragile one at that. Rene asked me to crouch down and take a look at what I was walking upon – thousands upon thousands, probably millions, of tiny carnivorous plants in reds, auburns, golds and oranges. I saw hundreds of different shades of green; I saw purple heathers. I was utterly spellbound by the miracle of life.

Rene told me the peat was formed from layers of dead moss, and that just one inch would take 25 years to accumulate. The area we were walking