The Great Ķemeri Bog is hundreds of black pools set in a plain of moss west of Riga, crossed on a boardwalk. A raised bog takes no water from the ground below it. The dome sits above the water table and lives on rainfall alone, and rain brings almost nothing with it, so everything here is on a starvation diet. The pines are the proof: a century old, and no higher than a metre or two. The planks carry you over ground that would swallow a boot to the knee — 1.4 kilometres on the short arc, 3.4 on the long one. Where a pool comes close to the boards the water is tea-brown with peat, and on a windless morning it holds the clouds almost exactly.
Halfway round the long loop a wooden tower lifts you above the pines. From the top the bog is hundreds of black pools over flat moss, the boardwalk winding between them, and forest only as a distant rim. Wood sandpipers and golden plovers nest out on the open moss, and in Latvia these two breed on raised bogs and almost nowhere else. The plover's thin whistle carries a long way over flat ground. Beside the planks you find rosettes in the wet moss, a couple of centimetres across, red-haired and glistening. The round-leaved sundew cannot get nitrogen out of ground this starved, so it takes it from the flies that stick to those hairs. The heavy resinous smell along the boards is wild rosemary, and in a still, hot patch of it enough oil comes off the leaves to leave you light-headed. The bog did make somebody rich once. Its sulphur water turned Ķemeri into one of the fashionable spa towns of the Russian Empire, and the grandest hotel of them all, a hundred rooms nicknamed the White Ship, still stands at the edge of the moss. It has been empty since the 1990s, through three decades of failed sales.