The Times
Estonian nature park Soomaa

My beaver-spotting safari ends around midnight as I ground my boat onto the bank of the Raudna  beside a brightly-painted floating sauna. I walk towards my bed past a  flower meadow turned to a pale shimmer by a half moon in a darkening blue sky. The air is heavy with scent and silence.

I'm in Estonia - but far from the tourist throng of Tallinn, 90 miles south in Soomaa (pronounced So-ma). This is a PAN Park – part of a 'protected area network' built up over the last decade that has turned 11 of the continent's last true wildernesses into beacons of sustainable tourism stretching from Finland to Portugal. 

Soomaa, mind you, had wild pedigree way before any official designation. Roadless until the 1970s, Estonians long considered it a mysterious place where ancient beliefs lingered and spooky stories outnumbered people. Village witches practiced into the 20th century, and reputed haunts of the Devil dot the landscape.

And what a landscape. I'm not a morning person but sunrise over Kureesoo is worth my 3am wake-up. After a silent rush through pre-dawn woods, my guide Rait ushers me up a tall wooden watchtower as the first washes of light brush over a vista that demands a rethink of all my images of the word 'bog'. Spindly trees sprout from a loamy quilt speckled with pink and orange flowers. Jet-black water pools are cool dots woven into a startling diagram by wooden boardwalks.  

After hearing Rait's wolf-encounter tales over a picnic breakfast we head off-piste through the girdle of trees rising ram-rod straight around the bog perimeter. Bouncing along on a springy moss carpet several metres thick, Rait points out footprints – elk, lynx, bear - as well as an array of droppings that prompt him to reveal plans to create an iPhone app to help visitors identify what's what. Mulling over possible names – iPoop?, iPlop? - we cut through thicker undergrowth and burst suddenly into glorious meadow by one of Soomaa's skein of rivers. 

You'd expect Europe's premier bogland to have plenty of water but Soomaa's wet stuff also creates  its own remarkable 'Fifth Season'. Around April, as the Park shakes off winter's pale grip, meltwater can raise rivers up to five metres, turning swathes of Soomaa into a waterworld where people paddle along submerged roads or through woods whose trees have become bizarre obstacles. In the old days, the Fifth Season was celebrated as much as cursed, creating a hiatus from farming and other work that allowed locals welcome R&R – 1930s monochromes show local youngsters sat on rafts listening to old gramophones!  

But Soomaa offers various seasonal faces. Autumn spreads bright colour across bog, wood and meadow along with an explosion of fungi, while the winter landscape opens up what Rait calls “the book of trails”, a tracery of animal tracks recorded in ice. Spring is garlanded with wild flowers and wolf cubs, while summer's soaring mercury turns the inky bog-pools into chill-out spots for those not put off by their mysteries - or the clouds of biting insects that are a downside to the hot months. 

Over a few days, I walk through Soomaa's diversity. The Hupassaare Trail sets off  by the pretty  clapboard former home of Estonian's most famous composer Mart Saar to wind three miles through wood and bog even more beautiful than Kuresoo, while the Lemmjogi River Spit Forest Trail showcases the quirky world of beaverdom: fallen trunks strewn along the bank with bases gnawn into giant pencil tips; part-built dams like the work of tireless Brunels working in wood. The Toramaa Wooded Meadow Trail provides a gentle melange of tall waving flowers, butterflies and riverside grasses. 

Simple meals take on a special pleasure after each walk – grilled river fish scattered with dill, rich meat dishes, rustic vegetable concoctions. Cold beer becomes as enjoyable as fine Bordeaux. Accommodation is a series of cosy clapboard-clad places beside rivers or tucked into  forest clearings. I ease hiking aches with after-dinner saunas, padding back to my room in warm evening sunshine.

There are diversions too. At the quirkily-named Energy Herb Farm, I take coffee and cake in a beautiful waterside pavilion voted Estonia's best modern wood building, now complemented by a swish new spa. Another day, I get up close to some of Europe's most powerful horses – champion showjumpers and pullers of 20-ton carriages - at the Tori Horse Farm in the pretty village of the same name. But mainly there is the landscape – and after Soomaa the words 'bog' and 'standard' will never go together again.