Escaudain sits in the old heartland of the Compagnie des mines d'Anzin, the oldest and once the most powerful of the coal companies in northern France, and the landscape around it is pure mining country: rows of brick terraces, spoil heaps, old railway embankments and the occasional headframe standing like a monument. This is the Valenciennes end of the coalfield, close to the Belgian border, and it was here that coal mining in the north began in the eighteenth century. The town and its surroundings form one of the many components of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, which UNESCO inscribed in 2012 as an evolving cultural landscape.
The area inspired one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. Émile Zola came to the Anzin region in 1884 during a miners' strike, and the experience fed directly into Germinal, his powerful novel about the lives and struggles of coal miners. The film adaptation of 1993 was shot at the former mine of Arenberg at Wallers, a short ride to the north, whose headframes and buildings now house a centre for image and media. Arenberg is also famous among cyclists for the Trouée d'Arenberg, the brutal cobbled section through the forest that features in the Paris-Roubaix race.
Riding in this area is honest work rather than pleasure. The roads link the mining towns, with many roundabouts, traffic lights and speed bumps, and the traffic around Denain and Valenciennes can be heavy. Cobbles appear in the old streets, and they are slippery in the rain. But the forest of Raismes-Saint-Amand-Wallers, to the north, offers a pleasant change, with straight roads through the trees and small ponds formed by mining subsidence. The Arenberg cobbles themselves are for walking and cycling, so admire them on foot and spare your fillings.
Escaudain is a working town of about nine thousand people with fuel, bakeries, cafés and supermarkets, and Denain and Valenciennes have more services. Try a plate of frites from a local friterie, or a carbonnade flamande, beef stewed in beer, a classic of the north. Visit Arenberg, take a look at the headframes, and imagine the scenes Zola described. It is a landscape of hard labour and deep pride, and the people here are warm and welcoming.