Somewhere between Bolshaya Izhora and Lomonosov, along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, stood a summer house known as the Datcha of the Hospital. The name suggests one of the many country retreats built along this coast in the nineteenth century, when the road west from St Petersburg was lined with the estates of the aristocracy, merchants and institutions. Few of these houses survive intact, and the exact remains of this one are hard to pin down; it is better to take it as a pause on one of the most historic stretches of shore in Russia.
The coast here was the imperial riviera. Peter the Great gave land along the Peterhof road to his courtiers, and they competed to build palaces and gardens facing the sea. Oranienbaum, now called Lomonosov, was the estate of Prince Menshikov, Peter's closest companion, who built a grand palace there; later Catherine the Great added the Chinese Palace, an exquisite rococo pavilion in a wooded park. The town was renamed in 1948 after the scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, who ran a glass and mosaic factory nearby. Unlike Peterhof, Oranienbaum was never occupied by German forces during the Second World War, as it lay inside the bridgehead that held out through the siege of Leningrad, and its palaces survived in much better condition.
The landscape is a narrow coastal plain at the foot of a low ridge, the old shoreline of a post-glacial sea. Streams cut down from the ridge to the gulf, and parks and forests of oak, lime and pine cover the slopes. In spring the woods fill with birdsong; in autumn the colours are rich and the light is low and golden.
Riding along the coastal road is gentle and pleasant, with villages, forest, glimpses of the sea and, in places, the ruins of old estates. Traffic can be heavy near Peterhof, especially on summer weekends, when tour buses crowd the roads. Further west, beyond Lomonosov, things calm down. The road surface is generally decent, with patches and potholes in places.
Lomonosov and Peterhof have fuel, cafés and shops. If you are planning a trip to Russia, check entry requirements, insurance and travel advice carefully, and be aware that foreign payment cards are unlikely to work.