Kronstadt's guns were never only on the island. Peter the Great founded the fortress on Kotlin Island in 1703 to shut the mouth of the Neva, and over the next two centuries the defences spread across the shallows of the gulf, onto artificial islands and onto the northern shore, where numbered batteries covered the channel from the Karelian side. Northern Battery No. 6 belongs to that system, a low earthwork-and-masonry position on the coast near Gorskaya and Aleksandrovskaya, the old Gulf resort belt west of Lisy Nos.
The coastal highway here is the gift. It is the old Primorskoye route, running in places beside the water, with pine woods and low dunes on one side and bay-side villas on the other, and it is perfect for a gentle evening ride. The surface is mostly decent. Traffic builds on summer weekends, when the dacha crowd heads for the beach. Strong onshore winds can come off the gulf, and in autumn the light is low and silver.
What makes this stretch interesting is the dam. The Saint Petersburg flood barrier, begun in 1979 and long delayed, runs from the northern shore through Kotlin Island to the southern shore, and carries the ring road, so the old fortress strategy has been replaced by a concrete answer to the surges that have flooded the city for three centuries. In 1824 the great flood reached terrible heights, the one Pushkin wrote about in The Bronze Horseman. Fields of reeds, low sand banks and flocks of ducks line the water here, and the shallow gulf is a stopover for migrating geese and swans.
Tarkhovka, about six kilometres off, is a modest town of around seven thousand people, and a better bet for a station than the two smaller villages. Fill the tank at the ring road or in Sestroretsk before going down the coast, and carry some cash and water. Cafes are scattered, mostly seasonal.