Christmas in Tallinn

On arrival at Tallinn airport (TLL), your chauffeur meets you and drives the short distance into the Old Town to the Hotel Telegraaf, inside the medieval walls. Once you have settled in, your private guide walks you out to the Town Hall Square, where the Christmas market has run since the fifteenth century and is regularly voted the finest in Europe. Wooden stalls, a tall lit tree and the smell of roasted almonds fill the square. As the evening draws in, your guide leads you to a welcome dinner in a medieval guild-hall setting, the vaulted room and the old recipes a fitting start to the week. The cobbled lanes are quiet by the time you return.

After breakfast your guide leads you up to Toompea hill, the seat of Estonian power since the thirteenth century, for the onion domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and the long view over the lower town's red roofs. From there you walk the surviving stretch of the medieval city wall, climbing inside one of its defensive towers, in the best-preserved medieval capital in northern Europe. The afternoon winds through the merchant houses and guild halls of the Hanseatic old town at your own pace. In the evening your guide brings you back to the Town Hall Square market for Tallinn marzipan, said to have been invented here by the city's apothecaries, and a last cup of mulled wine under the lights.

After breakfast your chauffeur drives you south for about two hours to Tartu, Estonia's second city and its intellectual capital since the university was founded in 1632. Your guide walks you through the historic campus and the leaning Town Hall Square, home to a Christmas market on a different scale to Tallinn's: smaller, warmer and unmistakably a university town's, with mulled wine sold from student-run stalls. You take lunch in the old Gunpowder Cellar, a vaulted tavern built into a former munitions store, before an unhurried walk through the riverside park and the old wooden-house quarter. Your chauffeur brings you back north to Tallinn in the early evening, in time for dinner on your own within the walls.

After breakfast your chauffeur drives you east into Lahemaa National Park, Estonia's oldest and largest, along the northern coast. Your guide leads you onto the raised-bog boardwalks for a winter walk across the frozen pools and dwarf pines, the light low and the silence complete but for the crunch of snow underfoot. From the bog you continue to one of the park's restored manor estates for a warming lunch and time to wander the grounds. As dusk falls, your guide leads the initiation into the Estonian smoke sauna, a chimneyless log bathhouse tradition recognised on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list, heated for hours beforehand and followed, if you are willing, by a plunge in the snow. Your chauffeur brings you back to Tallinn for a last dinner within the walls.

Your last morning is unhurried: a final breakfast within the walls, then a last loop of the Town Hall Square market to carry a little of it home, marzipan and gingerbread for the journey. When you are ready, your chauffeur drives you to Tallinn airport (TLL) for your departure, the same guide who met you on arrival seeing you off. Five days, one square, one hotel, and a week of the north at its warmest hour.