Every evening at eight o'clock, traffic stops under the Menin Gate in Ieper and buglers of the local fire brigade play the Last Post for the soldiers of the British Empire who died in the Ypres Salient and have no known grave. The ceremony has been held almost every evening since 1928, interrupted only during the German occupation in the Second World War. Walk from the gate to the Grote Markt and you come to the Cloth Hall and its belfry, a huge Gothic building that dominated medieval Flanders, when Ypres was one of the great cloth towns of Europe.
What you see is largely a reconstruction. The city was destroyed in the First World War, and the Cloth Hall was reduced to a stump. After long debate, Ieper decided to rebuild, and the work took decades. Today the belfry is one component of the World Heritage inscription for the belfries of Belgium and France, and the hall houses the In Flanders Fields Museum, which tells the story of the war in the Salient through the experiences of ordinary people. Ieper also has a curious tradition: the Kattenstoet, a cat festival held every few years, recalls the medieval practice of throwing cats from the belfry, now replaced, thankfully, with stuffed toys.
The countryside around the town is flat and green, dotted with farms, villages and the white headstones of war cemeteries. Zonnebeke, with the memorial museum of Passchendaele and the vast Tyne Cot cemetery nearby, lies a few kilometres east. Poperinge, to the west, is known for its hops and for Talbot House, a club for soldiers during the war. The riding is gentle, on narrow lanes between fields, with cobbles in some villages and a lot of farm traffic. Wind and rain are frequent, and the light over the fields can be soft and melancholy.
Ieper has fuel, hotels, restaurants and cafés. Flemish cooking is substantial: stews with beer, fries, waffles, and in Poperinge, hop shoots in spring. Belgian beer is legendary, but best enjoyed after parking the bike for the night. If you arrive in the evening, park near the centre and walk to the Menin Gate before eight; the crowd is quiet and the ceremony short. Afterwards, the square is lit up and the belfry rises above the rebuilt facades, a stubborn monument to a town that refused to stay in ruins.