Flat country hides its stories well, and the strip of land around Vendin-le-Vieil, Pont-à-Vendin and Annay looks at first like any other piece of French Flanders suburbia: rows of brick houses, a canal, a few fields, a tangle of roads. Look again and the pattern reveals itself. The terraced streets are company housing, laid out by mining firms for their workers, and the low hills on the horizon are not hills at all but spoil heaps from the pits that once ran under this ground. The whole Nord-Pas de Calais coal basin was listed by UNESCO in 2012 as a living cultural landscape, and the area around Auchy-les-Mines and its neighbours is part of that long chain of pits, cités and terrils stretching across the north of France.
What makes it worth a stop is the human scale. These were not anonymous suburbs but whole communities built around the shaft: housing, schools, churches, allotments and the pithead, all owned by the company. Families lived here for generations, and the culture that grew up, from pigeon racing to brass bands to the local Picard dialect, still colours the region. The pits closed in the second half of the twentieth century, the last in the basin in 1990, and the towns have been working out what to become ever since.
The riding is honest rather than dramatic. Roads are mostly flat and straight, threading between towns with roundabouts, speed bumps and traffic lights, and the Canal de la Deûle near Pont-à-Vendin adds a little water to the view. Cobbled stretches still turn up on old streets, and they get slippery in the rain that blows in so often from the Channel. The wind across this open country can be strong, especially on the bigger roads, so expect a bit of buffeting. The light is at its best in the long evenings of early summer, when the brick glows warm and the terrils throw long shadows.
As a pause, this area is easy. Vendin-le-Vieil and the larger towns nearby have fuel, bakeries, cafés and supermarkets, and in this part of France a friterie is never far away. Order frites with a sauce of your choice and a local beer if you are not riding on, sit on a bench and watch the street. It is not a postcard, and it does not pretend to be one, but it tells you more about how ordinary people built modern Europe than most cathedrals do.