Arkhangelsk and White Sea Coast

Northern Dvina and White Sea landscapes with strong wooden-architecture stops.

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Why this ride

Northern Dvina and White Sea landscapes with strong wooden-architecture stops. The road: M8 and White Sea roads. Distance and riding time are estimates from the checkpoints until the road is measured on this page.

Roadbook

1. Arkhangelsk start

   Arkhangelsk is the city Russia built when it had no other door to the sea. Ivan the Terrible ordered a port on the Northern Dvina in 1584, close to where the river splits into a maze of channels and islands before entering the White Sea, and for more than a century it was the country's only seaport open to European merchants. English and Dutch ships came here for furs, timber and tar. Peter the Great visited, built ships, and then founded St Petersburg and took the trade away, but the city kept its character as a northern timber and shipbuilding town.

   You feel the water everywhere. The Dvina is wide, slow and brown, and the city stretches along it for kilometres, with wooden houses, Soviet blocks and cranes sharing the bank. The Pomors, the Russian settlers of this coast, lived by fishing and sealing and sailed far into the Arctic, and their culture still colours the local food, which leans to fish, cloudberries and rye. The great scientist Mikhail Lomonosov was born in a village a short way upriver, and his statue stands in the city. Malye Korely, an open-air museum of wooden churches, windmills and farmhouses, sits on the edge of town and is a good place to see what the north once looked like.

   The riding out of town is long, flat and forested. Roads to the White Sea coast and toward Onega run through spruce and birch, with bogs on either side, and the surface can alternate between decent asphalt and broken patches, especially after the thaw. Distances are large, and so are the gaps between services. In June the white nights mean you can ride very late, and mosquitoes make stops short. In winter, the whole region freezes hard and daylight shrinks to a few hours.

   Arkhangelsk has more than three hundred thousand people, so fuel, food and repairs are all easy, and Isakogorka on the edge of town adds more. Fill the tank before heading out, since smaller villages may have little. Foreign riders should check what is currently possible before planning a trip.

2. Severodvinsk stop

   In 1553 an English ship looking for a northern passage to China ended up instead in the mouth of the Northern Dvina, near a monastery dedicated to Saint Nicholas. Its captain, Richard Chancellor, made his way to Moscow and the court of Ivan the Terrible, and the trade route he opened between England and Russia through the White Sea shaped the history of the north for more than a century. The monastery still stands on the edge of what is now Severodvinsk, its wooden and stone buildings surrounded by the cranes and workshops of one of the largest shipyards in the country.

   The city itself is young, built from the 1930s onward around that shipyard, which has produced many of Russia's nuclear submarines. It was long a restricted place and still has a strongly military and industrial character, with wide Soviet avenues, rows of apartment blocks and a population of nearly two hundred thousand. It is not a beautiful city in the conventional sense, but it has a certain stark grandeur, and the sea is never far away. Yagry island, joined to the city by a bridge, has a long sandy beach on the White Sea, popular with locals in the short summer.

   The ride from Arkhangelsk, about thirty-five kilometres east, crosses flat, marshy country along the Dvina delta, with forest, bogs and small rivers. The road is straight and generally decent, but busy with commuters and trucks at rush hour. Beyond Severodvinsk, the coastal roads westward along the White Sea are quieter and rougher, with gravel sections and long stretches of forest. The weather is cool even in summer, and the White Sea wind can be raw.

   Severodvinsk has all the services a rider needs: fuel, shops, cafes, hotels and workshops. Be discreet with photography near the shipyard and military areas, which are sensitive. For a break, the beach on Yagry is pleasant on a warm day, and the monastery is worth a look for its connection to Chancellor and the English trade. In June the white nights mean that darkness never really falls, and the light over the White Sea at midnight is pale, silvery and strangely beautiful.

3. Kholmogory stop

   Mikhail Lomonosov, the fisherman's son who walked to Moscow in the winter of 1730 and became Russia's first great scientist, poet, chemist and founder of its first university, was born on an island in the Northern Dvina just outside Kholmogory. His home village now carries his name and has a museum devoted to him, with displays on his life and the Pomor world he came from. For Russians the story of the boy who followed a fish convoy to the capital and changed the country's intellectual life is a kind of national legend.

   Kholmogory itself is a quiet village of about four thousand people, but it was once among the most important places in the Russian north. Before Arkhangelsk was founded in the late sixteenth century, this was the main trading town on the Dvina, the seat of governors and archbishops, and the point where English and Dutch merchants came to trade. When the port moved downstream, Kholmogory slowly faded, leaving a few old churches, a cathedral and a sense of past grandeur in a modest setting. The area is famous for two things: a breed of black-and-white dairy cattle, and delicate bone carving, a craft that has been practised here for centuries.

   The Dvina valley around Kholmogory is broad and flat, with meadows, channels, islands and forest. In spring the river floods, sometimes dramatically, and in summer the meadows are full of wildflowers and cattle. The roads here follow the valley, mostly flat, with long straights, occasional bends and a surface that varies from good to poor. Traffic is light, but watch for farm vehicles and loose animals. In summer, the white nights mean long, bright evenings, while mosquitoes near the water can be fierce.

   The village has a shop or two and simple cafes, and fuel should be available along the main road, though it is worth filling up in Arkhangelsk, about seventy kilometres north, before setting out. The Lomonosov museum is a short ride away, and makes a good stop for anyone interested in Russian history. Take time to wander the old churches, look out over the river, and imagine the merchant ships that once tied up here.

4. Back to Arkhangelsk finish

Where this sits

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