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.
From Somain it runs 256 km to Somain; allow about 4 h 25 of riding. On the way it passes Cité des Soeurs, Funerary and memory sites of the First Wor and back through Cité des Soeurs. It crosses from France into Belgium - carry ID and check the toll rules. The line favours views over speed.
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 is where the day begins. Next is Cité des Soeurs.
At the western edge of the coalfield, where the plain of the mining basin starts to buckle into the chalk hills of Artois, the town of Barlin grew up around its pits. The Cité des Soeurs is one of its housing estates, rows of brick miners' houses with gardens, and Terril 244, a slag heap now furred with trees, stands nearby like a man-made hill. Both belong to the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin World Heritage Site, which covers more than a hundred kilometres of coal country from the Belgian border westwards.
Read the complete Cité des Soeurs write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cité des Soeurs comes up about 64 km into the recorded legs. Next is Funerary and memory sites of the First Wor.
Every evening at eight o'clock, traffic stops under the Menin Gate in Ypres, and buglers from the local fire brigade sound the Last Post in memory of the soldiers of the British Empire who died in the Ypres Salient during the First World War. The ceremony has been held almost every evening since 1928, interrupted only during the German occupation in the Second World War, and it draws crowds of all ages, many of them descendants of the fallen. The gate itself is inscribed with the names of more than fifty thousand soldiers whose bodies were never found. It is one of the sites included in the World Heritage inscription of the Funerary and Memory Sites of the First World War, inscribed in 2023.
Read the complete Funerary and memory sites of the First Wor write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 129 km into the recorded legs you reach Funerary and memory sites of the First Wor. Next is back through Cité des Soeurs.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cité des Soeurs write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Cité des Soeurs, late in the day. Next is 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 at Cités de Beaurepaire. That is the ride.
Cités de Beaurepaire → Cité des Soeurs is 64 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Cité des Soeurs → Funerary and memory sites of the First Wor is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Funerary and memory sites of the First Wor → back through Cité des Soeurs is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Cité des Soeurs → Cités de Beaurepaire is 64 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.