A headframe is the most honest piece of architecture in a mining country, because it exists only to hold up a wheel. The chevalement of Pit 3 bis at Lens is one of those tall, simple frames of concrete or steel, once used to raise coal and men from hundreds of metres underground, and it is now one of the markers of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, listed by UNESCO in 2012 as a living cultural landscape. At the height of the industry, hundreds of such frames stood on this flat country, and the sky was filled with smoke and steam.
The mining basin is an odd, powerful place. Around Lens and Liévin the land is flat, and the only hills are man-made: the terrils, slag heaps of waste rock, some of them as high as a small mountain, now covered in birch, broom and rare orchids. The twin terrils at Loos-en-Gohelle, about a hundred and eighty metres high, are the tallest in Europe and can be climbed, with a wide view over the plain. Between them stand the brick cités, the rows of workers' houses built by the companies.
Lens itself has reinvented itself with culture. The Louvre-Lens, a long, low museum of glass and aluminium, opened in 2012 on the site of an old pit, and its gallery runs through centuries of art in a single space. Lens is also a football town: Racing Club de Lens, with its red and gold shirts and a fiercely loyal crowd, has played at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis for generations. Fuel and food are easy, with Liévin less than a kilometre away.
Local food is generous and unpretentious: carbonade flamande, a beef stew with beer, frites, strong maroilles cheese and local beer. The language of the region, Picard or ch'ti, still lingers in older speech. For riding, the roads are flat and straight, with cobbles in places, and weather is changeable, often grey. Spring and early autumn are most pleasant, and the low light on the red brick of the cités is memorable.