Black hills on a flat land. That is the image most people keep of the Nord-Pas de Calais coal basin, a band of former mining country stretching about 120 kilometres from the Belgian border westward towards Béthune, where for nearly three centuries coal was dug from deep underground. The slag heaps, the terrils, rise like pyramids above the towns, and the mining villages, the cités, line the streets in rows of brick houses. In 2012 the basin was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognised as a living cultural landscape, with over three hundred elements protected.
Near Vieux-Condé and Hergnies, at the eastern end of the basin, coal was first found in the early eighteenth century, and mining spread westward over the following centuries. The life of the miners, with its hardships and its strong community spirit, was described by Émile Zola in Germinal, set in a fictional mining town in this region. The last pit in the basin closed in 1990, and the region has struggled with unemployment since, but it has also embraced its heritage, turning old pits into museums, cultural centres and parks.
The riding in the eastern part of the basin is flat and often busy, through towns and villages that blend into each other, but the Scarpe-Escaut regional natural park, created in 1968 as the first regional natural park in France, offers quieter roads through forests, wetlands and farmland. The forest of Raismes-Saint-Amand-Wallers is the heart of the park, and the old mining site of Arenberg, in the forest, is now a media and cultural centre. The famous cobbled sector of the Paris-Roubaix cycle race, the Trouée d'Arenberg, runs through the forest, and riding it on a motorcycle is a jarring experience.
Vieux-Condé, two kilometres away, is a town of ten thousand with fuel and shops, and Condé-sur-l'Escaut and Valenciennes are nearby. The local food includes maroilles cheese, carbonnade and frites, and beer is a serious matter. The light here is often grey and soft, and the terrils, now green with vegetation, are good places to climb for a view over the land. Visiting the basin is a reminder of the human cost of the industrial age.