Coal made this corner of northern France, and for a century and a half it made it black. The mining landscape listed by UNESCO runs for a hundred and twenty kilometres across the old Nord and Pas-de-Calais coalfield, and the sector at this stop lies in the Valenciennes end of it, close to the Belgian frontier and the river Escaut, which the Belgians call the Scheldt. The pits of Anzin, the company that started the whole business in the middle of the eighteenth century, were the first great mines in France.
Those heaps are the landmark you will actually see. The terrils, as they are called, rise abruptly out of flat farmland, and birch and broom have colonised most of them. Some are now nature reserves, and the Scarpe-Escaut regional park, just to the west, has made a point of keeping the wet hollows where the ground sank above old workings. Herons and reed warblers live in places that were once ploughed fields.
The riding is flat, straight and quiet, which is the honest description. Roads run between brick terraces of miners' housing, the cités, past level crossings and canal bridges, and through villages whose names finish in the same few syllables. Cobbled stretches appear without warning, as the north's cycling fans will tell you, and in wet weather they are slick as a plate. Wind from the North Sea sweeps across the open land, and rain is never far away. Vieux-Condé, with eleven thousand inhabitants, has fuel, a bakery and a few bars, and nothing else nearby is bigger.
If you want food, ask for the local fare: a carbonnade of beef cooked in beer, or a plate of frites with a fricadelle, bought in a roadside friterie with a queue out of the door. Belgian beer is a short ride away over the border, and the contrast in prices will show on the bill.
Come on a clear autumn day, when the low sun catches the brick and the leaves turn on the terrils, and the district looks better than its reputation.