On the Franco-Belgian border, in a forest that has never much cared which country it is in, a pale classical château stands in a clearing. The Château de l'Hermitage was built in the eighteenth century for the dukes of Croÿ, one of the great aristocratic families of the region, as a refined country retreat, and it sits just inside France, near Condé-sur-l'Escaut, at the edge of the forest of Bon-Secours. The family's title went back centuries, and their estates spread across both sides of what is now the border.
A few hundred metres away, on the Belgian side, the twin-towered basilica of Notre-Dame de Bon-Secours rises above the trees in Péruwelz. It is a pilgrimage church built in the late nineteenth century around a much older devotion to a statue of the Virgin, and the border runs almost at its doorstep; a café on one side of the street can be in France while the shop opposite is in Belgium. Customs houses and border stones hint at the smuggling that once thrived here, especially of tobacco, coffee and butter.
The surrounding landscape belongs to the Scheldt plain, the Escaut in French, a flat, watery country of meadows, marshes, canals and woods, protected on both sides of the border by cross-border natural parks. To the south lies the old mining basin of the Nord, where slag heaps and pithead frames rise above towns like Wallers-Arenberg, and the mining landscape is now on the World Heritage list. Ponds created by mining subsidence have become nature reserves full of birds.
The riding here is gentle, on small roads through forest, farmland and villages, with few hills and a great deal of brick. Cobbles still turn up in places, and they are dangerously slick in the wet; the famous cobbled sections of the Paris-Roubaix cycle race are not far to the west. Traffic is moderate, heavier near the towns. Péruwelz, a small Belgian town of about sixteen thousand people, two kilometres away, has fuel, shops and frites stands, and Condé-sur-l'Escaut and Vieux-Condé on the French side have the same. Fuel tends to be a little cheaper in Belgium, so it is worth checking the prices. A Belgian beer in a border café, with a plate of cheese, is an excellent way to end a ride here.