Anyone who follows cycling knows the Trouée d'Arenberg, the arrow-straight cobbled lane through the forest near Wallers where Paris-Roubaix often breaks apart. What fewer know is that the lane passes the gate of a colliery, and that the colliery is one of the jewels of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin World Heritage Site. Fosse Arenberg, with its three steel headframes and brick engine houses, closed in 1989, and a few years later Claude Berri filmed his version of Zola's Germinal here, using the pithead and the cités around it as a ready-made nineteenth-century mining town.
The site has been reborn as Arenberg Creative Mine, a centre for images and media research run with the University of Valenciennes, and the industrial buildings have been carefully preserved. Around it, the miners' houses of the cités still line the streets, and old slag heaps nearby have turned into wooded hills and wetlands rich in birds.
The forest of Raismes-Saint-Amand-Wallers wraps all of this in green. It is one of the larger woods in the north, part of the Scarpe-Escaut regional nature park, with ponds formed by mining subsidence, oaks and birches, and in spring a din of frogs and birdsong.
On a motorcycle, the cobbles are something to look at rather than ride. The Arenberg trench is normally closed to motor traffic, and on any pavé a bike skates and shudders, worse in the wet. The surrounding roads through the forest and the villages are calm and flat, with cyclists in numbers on weekends and around the race in April, when the area fills with fans. Valenciennes, a short ride east, has the larger choice of shops, garages and hotels.
Wallers, two kilometres away, has fuel and a few shops and cafés. Northern France is beer country, with farmhouse ales brewed in small breweries across the region, and the food leans hearty: carbonnade flamande, beef braised in beer and spiced bread, is the one to order on a cold day.