Palmse Manor

For seven hundred years the Estonian countryside was organised around Baltic-German manor estates, and Palmse - seat of the von der Pahlen family from 1677 to 1923 - is the estate where that world can still be read whole. It was the first manor complex in Estonia to be fully restored, and it anchors the inland half of Lahemaa National Park.

What you actually see

A dignified baroque main house from the 1780s, furnished as it would have been in the family's time, with the service world around it intact: stables, a smithy, a bathhouse, storehouses, a distillery - the estate made its money partly on vodka - and an orangery above a swan pond.

The landscaped park runs off into the forest, and the old tavern by the gate now feeds visitors. Taken together it is less a single building than a working diagram of how a manor economy fitted together.

When to go

• May to September - everything open, the park green, boats on the pond.
• December - Christmas markets and period events in the main house.
• Winter otherwise - the park is open and handsome under snow; the interiors run reduced hours.

Honest expectations

The interiors are restored rather than original - the house was emptied in the twentieth century, and what stands in the rooms is period furnishing assembled to match. It is convincingly done, but it is a reconstruction.

Weekends in July bring coaches. Early mornings have the park to themselves.

Nearby

Sagadi and Vihula manors are within fifteen minutes, and the trio makes the classic Lahemaa manor circuit. Viru bog and the coast villages are in the same park.