Coal made Roche-la-Molière. The town sits on the western edge of the Saint-Étienne basin, and for generations its hillsides were dotted with pit heads, slag heaps and miners' terraces. The mines are long closed, the spoil tips have grassed over, and today it is a quiet residential town of around ten thousand people with a château on its hill and good views back towards the city and the dark ridge of the Pilat beyond.
If you are riding out of Saint-Étienne, this is where the urban sprawl finally loosens. Head west and north and you drop towards the Loire gorges, where the river has carved a deep, wooded trench and been dammed into the long Lac de Grangent. The roads along the gorge rim are a joy: tight, cambered and lightly used outside summer weekends, with medieval ruins perched on rocky spurs above the water. The Saint-Victor-sur-Loire side is particularly good for a pause by the lake.
South-east, across the city, rises the Massif du Pilat, a granite ridge with beech and fir forests and roads that climb to more than a thousand metres, with views over the Rhône valley to the Alps on a clear day. It makes a fine contrast with the post-industrial basin you start from.
Saint-Étienne itself is an underrated place: it built arms, bicycles and ribbons, and its old Manufrance mail-order company was once known across France. The football club and its green shirts are a local religion. For practicalities, Roche-la-Molière has fuel, supermarkets and bakeries, and the wider Saint-Étienne area has everything a rider could need. Traffic can be heavy at rush hour, so a mid-morning departure makes the climb out of the basin far more pleasant.