Head north from San Francisco on Highway 101, across the Golden Gate Bridge. If you leave the downtown area at around 7.30 in the morning, even with sea fog moving in, you'll make it to Sebastopol in time for a breakfast stop around 9. Press on west towards the coast and by mid-morning, not far from the lonely petrol station where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the most famous sequence in The Birds, you'll be at Fort Ross. It sounds, and looks, American enough: a timber stockade close to the heaving Pacific. Ross. A Scottish name. It seems so, yet it is not. The fort was originally built as Fort Rus, by the Russians, in 1812.

LRB 8 July 2004 | PDF Download