The flat coalfield of northern France has one real hill near Liévin, and on top of it stand two tall white pylons carved with figures of grief. This is Vimy Ridge, taken by the Canadian Corps in April 1917, and the Canadian National Vimy Memorial looks out over the mining country below. Down on the plain, in Avion and Liévin, Pinchonval is a cité, a miners' housing estate of brick houses and gardens, and with dozens of other sites it makes up the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, a World Heritage Site since 2012.
Pinchonval itself is a residential neighbourhood, not a museum, so treat it as you would any street where people live. What makes it interesting is the planning: the coal companies built entire towns, with houses, schools, churches and allotments, designed to attract workers and keep them close to the pits. The architecture shifts from early terraced corons to roomier garden cités, and the brick details, porches and gardens reward a slow walk.
This patch of France has a heavy past. The front lines of the First World War crossed it for years, and just west of Liévin the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette stands beside the largest French military cemetery, with the Ring of Remembrance nearby listing the names of nearly six hundred thousand soldiers of all nations who died in the region. In December 1974 a firedamp explosion at the Saint-Amé pit in Liévin killed forty-two miners, one of the last great disasters of French coal mining. In Lens, next door, the Louvre-Lens museum now occupies a former pithead site.
Riding here is mostly short hops between towns: roundabouts, speed bumps, the odd cobbled street and traffic around Lens. The stretches that lift your mood are the climbs onto Vimy and Lorette, short roads with wide views over a plain dotted with black conical slag heaps, some among the tallest in Europe at Loos-en-Gohelle.
Liévin, two kilometres away, has fuel and every service. Stop at a friterie for a cone of chips with a sauce of your choice; it is as much a part of the culture here as the pits ever were.