Lypovets Lake (Morske Oko)

Three depths are on record for Lypovets Lake and none of them agree. The information board at the water says 45 m. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine says five to seven. Divers who went down found a volcanic fissure opening at 12 m, water pushing up through it, and no floor they were prepared to call a bottom. People in the village say the whole thing is shallow and always was.

The argument matters because of what the lake is. Not a flooded quarry, not a dammed pond: water standing in a funnel that opened over the side vent of an extinct volcano, in the north-eastern corner of the Tupyi massif — the same volcanic chain that carries the hill Khust castle sits on, 15 km down the valley. Naturalists call it the last lake of its kind left in the Ukrainian Carpathians. It is small: 0.18 ha, about fifty metres across, two minutes to walk round, at 526 m.

A village on a 300-metre slope

Lypovets lies in a ravine off the road north out of Khust, and the gap between its lowest and highest house is about 300 metres of altitude — which tells you most of what you need to know about the last part of the drive. Nobody arrives here by accident: the village is not on the way to anywhere and there is no resort attached, which is most of why the lake still feels the way it does.

From the turning it is a quarter of an hour on foot up a field track between the houses, with a sign for Morske Oko on the last stretch. That is the whole approach: no waymarks, no ascent worth the name, nothing you need boots for.

The lake that never ices over

There is no stream in and no stream out. The lake is fed from below, by groundwater rising from considerable depth, and that is why it neither dries up in a drought nor freezes in a hard winter. Guidebooks push the second half into a superlative — the only lake in Ukraine that never ices over — and whatever survives scrutiny, the effect is easy to verify: on a frost morning the surface stays black and open while everything round it is white, and steam lifts off the water.

Which makes winter one of the better times to come, and almost nobody does. Morske Oko, Sea's Eye, is a name about the water and not the setting: cold, still, unusually clear against the dark of the fir slopes. Benches sit under a shelter on the bank, which is a hint about how to use the place — half an hour of sitting pays back better than a photograph and a departure.

Kazan, and the lake that moved

The water used to be higher up the slope, in the version people in Lypovets tell, in a hollow they still call the Kazan — the Cauldron. Its sides were steep, cattle coming down to drink kept falling in, and the villagers filled the hollow with stone; the big stones are said to be lying at the bottom of it still. Some time afterwards the water reappeared lower down, where it is now. Throw a rock into the Kazan, the story finishes, and you hear it come back at the lake.

It has exactly the shape a folk account of strange ground tends to have — water with a hidden route to somewhere else. Which, for a spring-fed crater, is not far off.

Red rock, a waterfall and the 802-metre meadow

In the forest above the lake stands a red volcanic outcrop. The district has two named ones, Malyi and Velykyi Cherlenyi Kamin, though the larger name is used loosely: what is red is most of a rib of the mountain rather than one rock. Against the beech and fir it is the plainest evidence of what built this landscape.

Walk west and the track climbs past the drop above that rock, out of the trees and up to a polonyna at 802 m, with the Borzhava valley and the Velykyi Dil massif opening to the north. A small waterfall nearby is worth a stop after rain and dry to nothing in a hot spell. Lypovets still has an old water mill, and the track carries on over Yurytsia to Imstychevo and its 18th-century convent.

Getting there, and when to come

By public transport, get to Lypcha on the road north out of Khust, change to the Lypovets bus and get out at the turning for the village; by car, drive in and start at the top end of the houses. May to September is the standard advice, and the climb to the polonyna is worth doing in autumn colour. If you come for the steam instead, reckon with the road: the last stretch up to the village is steep and is not always cleared quickly.