Eduard Totleben was the engineer who held Sevastopol in the Crimean War, and the Russian navy named a fort after him in the ring of defences that guards Saint Petersburg from the sea. Fort Totleben, along with its neighbour Fort Peter I, belongs to the northern line of fortifications built on shoals in the Gulf of Finland, in the nineteenth century, to protect the approaches to Kronstadt and the capital.
The ride along this stretch of coast is calm and easy. The Primorskoe highway runs along the north shore of the gulf, through pine woods and past dachas, with a decent surface, moderate bends and occasional speed cameras. Traffic builds on summer weekends, when the city flees to the beach, and the best time to ride is early on a weekday morning.
Sestroretsk, with over thirty-seven thousand people, is a short ride away and is where you buy fuel and food. Peter the Great founded it in 1714 as an arms factory town, and a lake created for the works, Razliv, is also known for a small hut where Lenin hid in the summer of 1917 before the October Revolution, now a museum. Razliv itself is a little place of about twelve hundred people.
If you want an image to carry away, stand on the shore near sunset and look out at the long horizon of the gulf, where the forts sit like low ships at anchor. They were built for a war that never came in the form their designers feared, and the gulf is left to the gulls. The sand is pale, the pine trees tall and the light, in summer, almost endless.