After spending a few days in Tallinn three years ago it was a delight to revisit this beautiful medieval city in Estonia.  The view from the city walls overlooking the towers and red roofs is magnificent.  It was then a hurried walk during a thunderstorm, down through the narrow cobbled streets and alleys avoiding the tour groups, to the town centre to visit the Raeapteek.  It is a fascinating place considered to be the oldest continuously operating pharmacy in Europe and is still in the same building, with the first records dating from 1422 although there were owners before then.  In the museum there is an extensive display of old medicinal equipment, recipes and examples of ingredients used in medieval potions such as pickled worms, snakeskin, horse hooves, parched bees and burnt hedgehog.  We no longer use unicorn horn (although I am unsure where this was found) for male potency, nor most of the other strange things, but we do use many of the plants in herbal medicine today with one of the best sellers now being marzipan which is considered “to cure broken hearts.” There is also a wide variety of things currently sold in most pharmacies so S had plenty of choice of modern familiar painkillers and by the time we left the warm sunshine had appeared.