100 stories from the hiking route

1999 – Oksa hay barn is built

Information

Topic

Village life and society work

Coordinates

Long-Lat WGS 84

Latitude: 58.46494167

Longitude: 25.20255278

L-EST 97

x: 6481148
y: 570178.2

Location

Ikla-Aegviidu Hiking route

The Oksa (Estonian for “branch”) hay barn was built in 1999 to replace the old barn in the same location. The Oksa barn and its shingle roof were built by master builder Ain Jürisoo within the Estonian and Danish cooperation project “Protecting the Biodiversity of the Soomaa National Park”. The construction was financed by the state of Estonia and the Danish Nature Foundation. The Soomaa National Park’s visitor centre and exhibition were also prepared within this project.
The hay barn is used to store the hay gathered during maintaining the large meadows on the banks of the rivers in Soomaa. In the old times, before humans settled in the bogs and forests of Soomaa, the floodplains were home to the large and fertile flooded forests with a lush vegetation. People needed bigger and bigger arable lands and hayfields in order to cultivate crops and gather hay for the winter for the animals. More fertile lands were chosen to be cleared for hayfields, which is why the fertile flooded forests were replaced by meadows.
Today, there are about 1,500 hectares worth of meadows in the Soomaa National Park. If human activity stopped and hay was no longer cut for animal feed, the forest would begin to reclaim its old acreage. Currently, around 700 hectares of meadows are maintained in a year at the National Park.