The mining basin of Nord-Pas-de-Calais is flat country made hilly by hand. Around Lens, the heaps of slag left by two centuries of coal digging rise like black pyramids above the fields, and the red-brick miners' houses stand in long, tidy terraces, row after row, called corons. This particular stop lies in the town of Lens, in a cité, the name for a company-built miners' estate, and the numbers in the label come from the way the mining companies numbered their pits and estates.
Coal was first found here in the middle of the nineteenth century, and for a hundred years the region produced much of France's energy. The work was dangerous and the communities were close. At Courrières, a few kilometres east, an explosion in March 1906 killed more than a thousand miners, the worst mining disaster in Europe, and it led to strikes and reforms. The last pit in the basin closed in 1990. Since then the landscape has been reinvented, and in 2012 the mining basin was inscribed on the World Heritage list as a living cultural landscape, with the pit heads, the slag heaps and the housing estates together. The best known of the heaps, the twin terrils of Loos-en-Gohelle, are the highest in Europe, with a path to the top and a view for miles over the plain.
In Lens itself, the Louvre-Lens museum, a long, low building of glass and aluminium, opened in 2012 on the site of an old colliery. The town was almost destroyed in the First World War, and then again heavily bombed in 1944, and its centre has a surprising Art Deco look as a result.
For a rider, this is a flat, straight, practical landscape with cobbled sections on some of the old roads, so wet pavé needs respect. The reward is in the details: pit-head frames, the church spires, slag heaps with silver birch trees on their slopes, and small museums. Winter days are short and grey, and rain is frequent, so spring and early autumn are the best seasons. Vimy Ridge, with its Canadian memorial, is ten minutes away.
Lens has thirty-eight thousand people and has all the fuel, cafes and supermarkets you need. Local food is hearty: frites with a carbonnade of beef stewed in beer, maroilles cheese and strong ale, and the town's brasseries do them well, especially on a cold day.