The belfry of Béthune has been standing in the middle of the Grand Place since the fourteenth century, and it has survived more than most of the buildings around it. In 1918 the town centre was almost completely destroyed by German shelling, and the square was rebuilt in the 1920s in a mix of Flemish and Art Deco styles, with tall, ornate façades in brick and stone around the old tower. The belfry, a symbol of the town's ancient freedoms, is part of the UNESCO listing of belfries of Belgium and France, and climbing its stairs gives a fine view over the rooftops and the flat land around.
Béthune sits at the western edge of the old mining basin of the Pas-de-Calais, between the Artois hills and the plains of Flanders. To the east the landscape is dominated by slag heaps, including the twin terrils of Loos-en-Gohelle, among the highest in Europe, and by the brick towns and cités of the mining companies. To the south lie the battlefields of the First World War, including the ridge of Notre-Dame de Lorette, with its vast military cemetery and the striking Ring of Remembrance, which lists the names of nearly six hundred thousand soldiers of all nations who died in the region.
The riding is mostly flat to gently rolling, with straight roads through farmland and towns, and more interesting stretches in the Artois hills to the south and west. Traffic can be heavy near the towns and on the main roads, and the weather is often grey, windy and wet. Cobbled streets appear in town centres.
Béthune is a market town of some thirty thousand souls, and nobody leaves it hungry or on reserve. The Grand Place is lined with cafés and brasseries, and the local food includes hearty dishes like carbonnade, welsh, a cheese and beer dish on toast, and maroilles tart, made with the strong-smelling cheese of the north. The Louvre-Lens museum, about twenty kilometres away, is a superb modern art museum in a former mining site.
The northern light is at its softest in May and September, and the rain is at least warmer then. Stand in the Grand Place, look up at the belfry and around at the rebuilt façades, and you will see a town that has refused, more than once, to disappear.