From a distance they look like hills, which in this flat country is reason enough to stare. The terrils numbered 87 and 92, on the edge of Noyelles-Godault and Dourges next to Hénin-Beaumont, are spoil heaps from the coal mines of the Nord-Pas de Calais basin, made of the shale and rock that came up with the coal over a century and more of mining. They are part of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2012 as a whole cultural landscape: pits, headframes, miners' housing, schools, churches and these artificial black mountains, more than a hundred of which are protected.
Nature has been quietly reclaiming them. Some heaps are still bare and dark, others are covered in birch, buddleia and grasses, and because the black shale warms quickly in the sun, they host plants and insects more at home further south. Ecologists find rare orchids, lizards and nesting birds on these slopes, and several heaps have marked paths to the top, where on a clear day you can look across a landscape of towns, canals, motorways and other terrils stretching to the horizon.
The riding here is not about scenery in the conventional sense. Roads are flat, often straight, and busy with traffic around the A1 and A21 motorways and the commercial zones of Noyelles-Godault, one of the biggest shopping areas in the region. Cobbles turn up in older streets, and roundabouts come thick and fast. But the mining landscape has a strange beauty, and riding between the heaps and the cités, the long rows of brick miners' houses, gives a real sense of what this place was.
The last coal pit in the region closed in 1990, and the area has struggled since with unemployment and change. Hénin-Beaumont is the main town nearby, and Douai and Lens are not far. Fuel and food are easy to find in the commercial zones and the towns. For a local taste, try a carbonnade flamande, beef braised in beer, or a welsh, a regional dish of cheddar melted with beer over bread and ham, and a beer from one of the many breweries of the north.