CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
An 81 km round trip from Petrodvorets - roughly 1 h 23 in the saddle. On the way it passes The Barrier of Cribwork, Northern battery No. 7 and back through The Barrier of Cribwork. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Water arrives beside the road and stays for 16 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go — slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did.
For about 22 km this is Saint Petersburg Imperial Shore, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it. Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast.
Peterhof is the tsars' answer to Versailles, strung along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland about thirty kilometres west of St Petersburg, and Sergievka belongs to its quieter western fringe. Think of it less as one famous building than as a country estate in the old Peterhof manner, with a house, an overgrown park, ponds and lawns, laid out when noble families built summer retreats close to the court.
Read the complete The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka» write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka» is where the day begins. Next is The Barrier of Cribwork.
Kronstadt is a naval town on an island, and nothing about it feels like anywhere else in Russia. Kotlin lies about thirty kilometres west of the centre of St Petersburg, a long thin island of some twelve kilometres, and when Peter's engineers decided to close the sea approaches in the early eighteenth century they did it with timber. The barrier of cribwork was a line of log cribs filled with stone, sunk across the shallow channels so that enemy ships could only pass under the guns, and this label points to that engineering memory rather than to anything you can ride up to and touch. The cribs rotted or were buried long ago, and the sea lanes are now marked by fort islands and the modern dam.
Read the complete The Barrier of Cribwork write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The Barrier of Cribwork comes up about 19 km into the recorded legs. Next is Northern battery No. 7, 16 km on.
Not every stop on a route has a story that belongs to one fort, and this one belongs to a coastline. The north shore of the Gulf of Finland, between Sestroretsk and Lisy Nos, is a flat, sandy and pine-covered strip of land that was once Finnish territory, and the batteries and forts built on it, including the one the label calls Fort Constantin, were part of the same defensive system that guarded Kronstadt from the other side. The names Gorskaya and Tarkhovka belong to the settlements around, and the Dam, the huge flood barrier that links the island with the mainland, lands at this shore.
Read the complete Northern battery No. 7 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 41 km into the recorded legs you reach Northern battery No. 7. Next is back through The Barrier of Cribwork.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The Barrier of Cribwork write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through The Barrier of Cribwork, late in the day. Next is The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka».
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka» write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka». That is the ride.
The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka» → The Barrier of Cribwork is 19 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Barrier of Cribwork → Northern battery No. 7 is 22 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Northern battery No. 7 → back through The Barrier of Cribwork is 20 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through The Barrier of Cribwork → The Palace and Park Ensemble «Sergievka» is 20 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.