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: planning record, not independently verified geometry.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distances and riding times are planning figures. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 251 km round trip from Denain - roughly 4 h 20 in the saddle. On the way it passes Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens, Belfort en Stadhuis and back through Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens. It crosses from France into Belgium - carry ID and check the toll rules. The line favours views over speed.
Old and new: the label names two generations of company housing at Chabaud-Latour, and walking between them is a short lesson in how mining employers thought about their workers. The older cité is a grid of long brick rows, the corons of Zola's novels, packed close to the pit so that men could be at the shaft in minutes. The newer one, built later, spreads out in pairs and small groups of houses set in gardens, with wider streets and green space, part of a shift towards the garden-city ideal in the early twentieth century. Both belong to the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin World Heritage site.
Read the complete Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle is where the day begins. Next is Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens.
A headframe is the most honest piece of architecture in a mining country, because it exists only to hold up a wheel. The chevalement of Pit 3 bis at Lens is one of those tall, simple frames of concrete or steel, once used to raise coal and men from hundreds of metres underground, and it is now one of the markers of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, listed by UNESCO in 2012 as a living cultural landscape. At the height of the industry, hundreds of such frames stood on this flat country, and the sky was filled with smoke and steam.
Read the complete Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens comes up about 61 km into the recorded legs. Next is Belfort en Stadhuis.
British soldiers marching to the front in the First World War left Ypres by the road that led east towards Menen, and the gate they passed through became the Menin Gate, now a memorial bearing the names of more than fifty thousand soldiers with no known grave. Menen itself, about twenty kilometres from Ypres, sits right on the French border, on the river Leie, which the French call the Lys, and its town hall and belfry, standing on the market square, are part of the UNESCO listing of the belfries of Belgium and France. The belfry, like much of the town, was damaged in the war and rebuilt, and it remains the proud symbol of the town's civic history.
Read the complete Belfort en Stadhuis write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 126 km into the recorded legs you reach Belfort en Stadhuis. Next is back through Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens, late in the day. Next is Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle. That is the ride.
Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle → Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens → Belfort en Stadhuis is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Belfort en Stadhuis → back through Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Chevalement du n°3 bis de Lens → Cités Chabaud-Latour ancienne et nouvelle is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.