Bully-les-Mines lies just below the long ridge of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where the great French military cemetery overlooks the coalfield, and the juxtaposition says something about this part of France. The land around is a battlefield and a mining basin at the same time. In 1914 and 1915 the front line ran through here, and the villages were shattered. After the war they were rebuilt, and the new mining estates, the cités de la Victoire and des Arbres, took names that spoke of recovery.
The Monument du soldat Marche belongs to that story, a small memorial in a landscape full of them. Every village in the Pas-de-Calais has a war memorial, and many have more than one, and they are quiet reminders of how much was lost. Not far north, Vimy Ridge is the Canadian national memorial, with its twin white pylons visible for miles, and the vast cemetery at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette holds the remains of tens of thousands of French soldiers.
The mining cités here belong to the UNESCO listing of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, inscribed in 2012. They are rows of red-brick houses, each with a garden and often a pigeon loft, built in a rebuilding wave after the First World War, when the companies replaced destroyed housing with something more regular and more modern. Today their gardens are bright with dahlias and vegetables, and many have been renovated with care.
Riding in the Pas-de-Calais is very flat, and the road surface can be harsh, with patches of cobbles and frost damage. It is best enjoyed in the early morning or on a quiet weekend, when the light is soft and traffic is thin. In spring and summer the air smells of cut grass and turned earth, while autumn brings mist across the fields and the terrils glow with birch and broom.
Bully-les-Mines has twelve thousand people, with fuel, bakeries and small cafés, and the larger town of Lens is a short ride away. A visit to the memorial park at Vimy or the cemetery at Lorette is a thoughtful addition to a day.