Apple trees are seemingly everywhere in Estonia. Every house seems to have one in its garden, a litter of fruit at the root, a bowlful of homemade apple sauce at the breakfast table.

The Head of the Estonian Maritime Academy in Kuressaare, Anni Hartikainen, is telling us about the "blue economy".

At the National Costume Centre in Kuressaare, on the island of Saaremaa, our host Mareli Rannap is taking us through the subtle variations of Estonian women's traditional costume.

High on the top of the Great Trades Hall in the centre of Tallinn, perched at the very tip of its grand gothic gable, an elaborate weathervane spins into the wind. A silhouette of a Viking longship, maybe ... and is that a Danish flag?

Eesti is Estonian for Estonian.

Learn ten words of Estonian before we arrived, so that at least we could be polite to our hosts. Say thank you, please, hello. Just ten.

But there is a naturally occurring patch of the famously hard-wearing igneous rock near Tallinn, and several chunks of it played a cameo role in the turbulent events surrounding Estonia's declaration of independence from the USSR in 1991.

It is probably most notable as the place where artist Ilon Wickland grew up before escaping the Soviet invasion in 1944. Wickland fled to Sweden as a refugee, before eventually making her name as the illustrator of many books by Astrid Lundgren, author of the Pippi Longstocking stories, amongst others. There's a gallery and even a themepark - ...