Sablino Natural Monument

The Sablino natural monument lies near the settlement of Ulyanovka in the Tosnensky district, forty kilometres from Petersburg, covering 328.8 hectares. It includes two waterfalls, the canyons of the Sablinka and Tosna rivers with Cambrian and Ordovician rock outcrops, several caves of artificial origin, and a number of historic places: ancient burial mounds and the standing place of Alexander Nevsky before his battle with the Swedes. The waterfall on the Sablinka changes its height from year to year — from two to four metres: the variable flow is to blame, down to complete drying, along with erosion and other factors. The Tosna waterfall, also called Gertovsky, on the Tosna is fuller and more striking, especially in spring. The river canyons are a rare relief for a plain: walls of ancient sandstones and limestones grown with pines rise almost to the sky. The 'Sablino caves' are not karst but abandoned underground workings for the extraction of quartz sand of the Sablinka suite of the middle Cambrian, used for glass production. Most of the workings were created from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, when an industrial and construction boom began in Petersburg and the capital needed enormous quantities of glass. After the First World War and the revolutions the glass industry fell into decline; mining continued sporadically until the Second World War, and then the workings passed to a natural regime: collapses and floods split the single masses into unconnected fragments. Here too is the Pustynka hamlet, the former estate of count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy: the poet lived and wrote in these places. A day's route: the waterfalls, the canyons, the caves (with a torch and care), Pustynka — and back to the city by evening with the feeling that forty kilometres from the metropolis is another geology and another pace of time.