In any Internet search engine for the phrase "Big Vereyka, stone forest" 2-3 articles with a mention of this natural anomaly of the Ramon region come out. Although this is the case when the concept of "anomaly" is easily transformed into a "pearl".
A stone forest is a ravine, at the bottom of which, like a giant's hand, huge stones are randomly scattered over an area of just over one hectare. Some call it "stone forest", others - "stone ravine", and still others, hearing about this mystery of nature, shrug their shoulders in bewilderment - they say, this cannot be in the very center of the Chernozem region.
However - maybe, and how. If you find the village of Vasilyevka in the Ramonsky district on the satellite map, then about one and a half kilometers to the north-east of it there will be the same ravine with a stone forest. Of course, no map will convey the charm of this or that place - it needs to be emitted with your feet, and sometimes literally on your stomach. This is approximately what the journalists of MK in Voronezh did.
The contours of this girder, along the bottom of which the purest rivulet Bystrik flows, resemble a spider on the map - where instead of paws you can see several branches diverging to the sides.
A physical education teacher at a local school, 64-year-old Alexei Postovalov, recently became our guide to these "spider paws".
- The last time I was there last year, - said Aleksey Yakovlevich, - brought there children and grandchildren to admire, they have asked me for such an excursion for a long time. In the warm season, tourists from Voronezh often come here, climb the slopes of the ravine, photograph the stones. Although it's not easy to get here - you go from the asphalt to the grader, and then you saw three miles to Vasilyevka, you cross the embankment on Bystrika and immediately after it you turn right up the hill. You can't get close on a low city car, you have to leave it and walk about a kilometer on foot.
Promotional video:
Fog - looks like deception
Alexei Postovalov climbed the entire stone forest, while still a boy. I ran here to play "war" with the boys after school - the places at the bottom of the girder are deaf, stones are scattered everywhere, the best shelters for the "partisans" cannot be found. Again, the rivulet flows, before there was a lot of fish in it, even a minnow was caught, whose habitat is located far from these places - in Karelia, in the Vologda region, in Siberia. But it was the fast current of the clear waters of Bystryk, wriggling among the boulders, that attracted the outlandish fish to these places.
Before going to the stone forest, we talked a lot with the locals about the history of this mysterious jumble of boulders. From scraps of these conversations it became known that about thirty years ago scientists came to these places from Moscow, they dug something, wrote down, and with what they left - no one will remember. But after their departure, there was talk that these stones were fragments of some ancient structure like a fortress that once stood at the edge of a hill. Then over the years it, apparently, crumbled, and the cobblestones rolled downhill, to the bottom of the ravine, and thus became a stone forest.
I had a chance to hear a local legend that in the middle of the 19th century a merchant wagon train disappeared without a trace in these places. Allegedly, in the fog, several carts lost their way and ended up near a stone forest, and no one else saw them. And the local residents after that allegedly observed on rainy days in the vicinity of Vasilyevka some figures, as if covered with fog. Sometimes strange sounds are still heard from the direction of the stone forest …
Accustomed to miracles
- All this is nonsense! - the only inhabitant of today's Vasilyevka, 68-year-old Mikhail Aksenov, confidently declared to the guests from Voronezh. - People will be full of people who knows what! Yes, today tourists from Voronezh often come to our region to stare at the stones. This is a curiosity for them, but we have lived here all our lives, got used to these stones. There used to be 50 courtyards in Vasilyevka, a little to the side stood the manor house of the local landowner Surikov. But now there is nothing left - only I, with my sheep and rams, are living out my day. And I haven't been going to the stone forest for a long time - what have I not seen there?
Mikhail Aksenov says that the stone forest has always been a favorite place for the surrounding children to play, the children climbed the stones, caught fish, swam in Bystrik, even drank water from it - clean and cold. By the way, next to the bench in the courtyard of Mikhail Aksenov is a piece of a boulder brought back from that very stone forest …
The owner did not want to walk with the guests to the stones, but Aleksey Postovalov took us there in half an hour.
If you look at the stone forest from the edge of the meadow, which almost plummets 20 meters deep into the shade and coolness, it seems that in front of you is the set of a film about medieval knights. Cobblestones of different sizes seem to be the remains of an ancient castle. Only the ivy wrapping around them is missing and the sounds of Scottish ballads "off-screen".
Hide and seek with boulders
Bystrik we crossed the meter-long bridge in the form of an old board and immediately got into the world of stones.
- They are useless for construction, - explained the guide, - crumble, crack. And how do you get the equipment here to get them? You can't get close on anything. This means that this open-air museum will not be touched further.
Stones have been preserved here in different shapes and colors. One is an exact copy of the head of a person lying supine, only five times more. Another - the largest in the ravine - about three meters high, resembles a Russian stove.
“When my granddaughter, 10-year-old Vanya, first came here, he stopped in front of this stone and began to read poems about the Russian stove,” noted Aleksey Postovalov. - I could not stop, because this place interested him - a pure fairy tale!
The stone forest has its own riddle - the boulders are hiding in it, then, as it were, they crawl out into the light of God again. People who grew up in these places call them "wandering", they seem to play with uninvited guests. At least, Alexey Yakovlevich never found a pyramid of several stones lying on top of each other in a strange way, although he showed it to his relatives exactly a year ago. For half an hour, he climbed up and down a plot measuring about 70x20 meters, but neither in the bushes nor in the dense thickets of thorns this miracle of nature did not come to him.
- Where she went, I can’t put my mind to it! - the physical education teacher lamented, passing through the same place for the tenth time, but the pyramid sank into the water.
In the last few years, beaver huts have appeared on Bystrik within the stone forest. And while the journalists examined these places, splashes of water were heard here and there. Beavers - today's owners of these places - jumped into the water, hiding from uninvited guests.
- Of course, it would be nice to include a stone forest in some kind of tourist route, - Aleksey Postovalov dreams, - to make an entrance here, to improve the descent a little, I know for sure such places in our region - no! Although, on the other hand, it will be crowded, beer cans, ice cream cups will be everywhere. No, let the stone forest continue to be a chamber place. Those who have already been here will definitely come again. And the rest are not needed, otherwise, in ten years, mountains of garbage will grow here above these very stones!
Matvey Grigoriev