Baišleja Ravine

2019-12-26 In Cult Identity Latvia Ravine Rīga region

Location

State: Latvia
Region: Riga
County: Limbaži
Parish: Katvari

Other references to the location

Between the Kabri and the Ozoliņi homesteads

Coordinates

lat=57.5938888889, lon=24.8208333333
57° 35′ 38″ N, 24° 49′ 14″ E

Description

According to a tale, here, in the broad and wild lowland called the Baišleja Ravine, which used to be a kilometre long and about 200 – 300 m broad, there used to be a haunted place. The ravine itself, which is now overgrown by trees and bushes just as it was in previous times, was not examined by walking, but it was examined from highest points in the surroundings, from which the Baišleja Ravine can be well observed. The broadest view of the Baišleja Ravine is available from the Kabri homestead’s side. Over one end of the Baišleja Ravine, the highway is crossing from Pociems to the Limbaži – Aloja highway.

Narrative

“The Baišleja Ravine is situated within the territory of the Kabri homestead of Pociems, it is approximately a verst long and one fourth of the verst wide ravine embraced at day and night by great and partially forest overgrown hills. In the southern part, the ravine, just as usually at the beginning, is narrow, gradually expanding until turning flat in the northern part at the so called Tiltiņš Marsh. Yet some 50 years ago, the Baišleja Ravine was almost inaccessiblemarsh overgrown by osier and undergrowth, filled up with decaying branches and netted by hop tendrils — it was inaccessible for both people and cattle. A man and cattle would be caught in the deep marsh, one could go through the brushwood only by cutting one’s way with an axe. Only in the middle of the ravine on a hillock at a large birch-tree, there was hard land and not so dense shrub, but that hillock, they say, was the most scary place in all the Baišleja Ravine, entirely obsessed by the evel — on every branch of the birch tree, there was either a witch or a ghost, or some other evel creature lingering — not even the end of a branch was spared.” (In the Ālieši of Pociems. Recorded by Gustavs, Ethnographical Annex of “Dienas Lapas”. 1903, 865–866)