In 1678, after Louis XIV won Longwy from the Spanish Netherlands in the Treaty of Nijmegen, he sent his great military engineer Vauban to make sure nobody took it back. Vauban did not just fortify the old town; he built a new one, Longwy-Haut, on the plateau, designing a star-shaped stronghold with bastions, ditches and a geometric grid of streets around a central square with a well and church. It is one of the twelve sites grouped as the Fortifications of Vauban on the World Heritage list, and walking the ramparts you can still read the logic of seventeenth-century siege warfare in the earth and stone.
Longwy's later history belongs to iron and steel. The nearby ore fields fed great blast furnaces from the nineteenth century, and the whole corner where France, Belgium and Luxembourg meet became one of Europe's industrial heartlands, until the crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s closed the works and left deep scars. The town is also famous for enamels: the émaux de Longwy, brightly coloured decorative ceramics in a cloisonné style, have been made here since the late eighteenth century and still are.
The riding around Longwy is more about borders than about bends. In a few minutes you can be in Belgium or Luxembourg, and the landscape is a mix of old industrial towns, farmland, woods and rolling hills. The roads are good, traffic can be heavy with cross-border commuters at rush hour, and the more interesting riding lies to the north in the Belgian Ardennes and to the east in the Moselle valley. Winters here are often grey and damp; May and September are kinder.
There is fuel in Longwy, but the locals know better: Luxembourg's lower fuel taxes have made the stations just across the border famous, and the queues at Pétange or Rodange show it. Longwy-Haut has cafés around its square, and Lorraine food is solid and filling, from quiche to mirabelle plum tart. Take a moment at the ramparts to look out over the valley and the three countries that meet just beyond it.