In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, a young student working on a PhD in Anthropology, went to spend a year living in Estonia, a remote Baltic State that had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union. Armed with a notebook, rudimentary Estonian, and a clunky laptop, she arrived in the peninsula of Noarootsi, on Estonia's north-western tip, and made her way to the village of Purksi, the place that would be her home for the next twelve months.