CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
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Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 178 km round trip from Bruay-sur-l'Escaut - roughly 2 h 45 in the saddle. It goes by way of Cités de Beaurepaire, Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault, Beffroi de l’Hôtel de Ville de Loos and back through Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Brick terraced houses, small gardens and a straight street running toward the Escaut: at first glance the Cité du Rivage in Bruay-sur-l'Escaut looks like any working-class neighbourhood in northern France. It is part of something much larger. In 2012, UNESCO listed the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin, a landscape of pit villages, headframes, slag heaps and railways stretching over a hundred kilometres, as a monument to three centuries of coal. This cité is one of its many fragments, an early housing development built by the mining companies to keep their workers close to the pits.
Read the complete Cité du Rivage ancienne write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cité du Rivage ancienne is where the day begins. Next is Cités de Beaurepaire.
Somain exists because of the railway. Several lines meet here, and the town grew up around the station, which still has the busy feel of a junction. The Cités de Beaurepaire were built by the Aniche mining company, one of the great concerns of the northern coalfield, and they show how a company could shape a landscape: neat brick rows, small squares, a few shared buildings, and gardens laid out to a plan. A local will tell you who lived in which house and which families still do; an outsider notices the symmetry first, and then the small signs of individuality, a painted door, a trellis, a satellite dish pointing the wrong way.
Read the complete Cités de Beaurepaire write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cités de Beaurepaire comes up 26 km in. Next is Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault.
The flat country between Douai and Lens does not look like much from a motorway, but it holds one of the great industrial landscapes of Europe. For more than two centuries coal was dug from under these fields, and the mining basin of the Nord-Pas de Calais was listed by UNESCO in 2012 as an evolving cultural landscape of pits, slag heaps, railway lines and workers' housing. The Fosse Cornuault at Évin-Malmaison is one piece of that vast mosaic, a former colliery site with its associated buildings, set among the brick villages of the eastern part of the basin.
Read the complete Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
52 km in you reach Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault. Next is Beffroi de l’Hôtel de Ville de Loos.
Loos is a town on the southwestern edge of Lille, and its town hall belfry is part of the same UNESCO family as the medieval towers of Bruges and Ghent, though it is a much more modern member. In this corner of Europe a belfry was the symbol of a town's independence from lord and church, and when the industrial towns of the Nord built new town halls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they gave them belfries too, as a statement that they had grown up. Loos's tower, in brick and stone, does exactly that.
Read the complete Beffroi de l’Hôtel de Ville de Loos write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Beffroi de l’Hôtel de Ville de Loos, about halfway. Next is back through Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault sits at 105 km, about halfway. Next is back through Cités de Beaurepaire.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cités de Beaurepaire write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Cités de Beaurepaire comes up 131 km in. Next is Cité du Rivage ancienne.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cité du Rivage ancienne write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cité du Rivage ancienne closes the day.
Cité du Rivage ancienne → Cités de Beaurepaire is 27 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Cités de Beaurepaire → Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault → Beffroi de l’Hôtel de Ville de Loos is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Beffroi de l’Hôtel de Ville de Loos → back through Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Ensemble minier de la fosse Cornuault → back through Cités de Beaurepaire is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Cités de Beaurepaire → Cité du Rivage ancienne is 27 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.