CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
292 km from Bruay-sur-l'Escaut to Bruay-sur-l'Escaut, about 5 h 04 of riding. On the way it passes Cité Barrois, Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi, Terril n°10 and Beffroi de porte de Lucheux. The line favours views over speed.
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 Cité Barrois.
Rows of red-brick cottages, each with its garden, set along curving streets with trees: the Cité Barrois in Pecquencourt looks almost English, and that is no accident. In the later years of the coal era, the mining companies of northern France built garden cities for their workers, influenced by ideas from across the Channel about healthy housing and green space. This one is part of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, listed by UNESCO in 2012 as an entire landscape of pits, slag heaps, workers' housing, schools, churches and railways spread over more than a hundred kilometres.
Read the complete Cité Barrois write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cité Barrois comes up about 36 km into the recorded legs. Next is Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi.
Flat country hides its stories well, and the strip of land around Vendin-le-Vieil, Pont-à-Vendin and Annay looks at first like any other piece of French Flanders suburbia: rows of brick houses, a canal, a few fields, a tangle of roads. Look again and the pattern reveals itself. The terraced streets are company housing, laid out by mining firms for their workers, and the low hills on the horizon are not hills at all but spoil heaps from the pits that once ran under this ground. The whole Nord-Pas de Calais coal basin was listed by UNESCO in 2012 as a living cultural landscape, and the area around Auchy-les-Mines and its neighbours is part of that long chain of pits, cités and terrils stretching across the north of France.
Read the complete Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 67 km into the recorded legs you reach Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi. Next is Terril n°10.
In the western part of the Nord-Pas de Calais mining basin, around Bruay-la-Buissière, Divion and Marles-les-Mines, the horizon is shaped by terrils, the spoil heaps left by more than two centuries of coal mining. Terril number 10 is one of them, a dark cone of shale and waste rock that has slowly turned green as birch, broom and grasses have colonised it. The basin, with its pits, cités, railway lines and spoil heaps, was listed by UNESCO in 2012 as an evolving cultural landscape, recognising both the industrial history and the lives of the hundreds of thousands of miners who worked here.
Read the complete Terril n°10 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Terril n°10, about halfway. Next is Beffroi de porte de Lucheux.
Lucheux is a small village in a wooded valley in the north of the Somme, close to the border with the Pas-de-Calais, and its belfry is something of an oddity. Rather than rising above a town hall or a market square, as in the larger towns of Flanders and Picardy, it is built into a fortified gateway, a stout stone tower straddling the road through the village. It is part of the group of belfries of Belgium and France listed by UNESCO, a symbol of the civic freedoms that towns and villages won from their feudal lords in the Middle Ages. Above the village stand the ruins of a castle that belonged to the Counts of Saint-Pol, with a great hall and towers in a romantic state of decay.
Read the complete Beffroi de porte de Lucheux write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Beffroi de porte de Lucheux sits at 148 km, about halfway. Next is back through Terril n°10.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Terril n°10 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Terril n°10 comes up about 186 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 222 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi. Next is back through Cité Barrois.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cité Barrois write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Cité Barrois, late in the day. 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.
The route ends here after 292 km.
Cité du Rivage ancienne → Cité Barrois is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Cité Barrois → Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi is 31 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi → Terril n°10 is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Terril n°10 → Beffroi de porte de Lucheux is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Beffroi de porte de Lucheux → back through Terril n°10 is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Terril n°10 → back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi → back through Cité Barrois is 30 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Cité Barrois → Cité du Rivage ancienne is 40 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.