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.
246 km from Bully-les-Mines to Bully-les-Mines, about 4 h 14 of riding. It goes by way of Belfort met Lakenhal, Béguinage de Bruges and back through Belfort met Lakenhal. It crosses from France into Belgium - carry ID and check the toll rules. The line favours views over speed.
The ride follows Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel → Belfort met Lakenhal for 62 km.
A dispensary may seem an odd thing to visit, but this is a monument to something remarkable. In the nineteenth century the coal companies of northern France built housing, schools, churches and clinics for their workers, partly out of paternalism and partly to keep a stable workforce, and the miners themselves set up mutual aid societies, the sociétés de secours mutuel, to pay for doctors, medicines and funerals. The dispensary at Bully-les-Mines belongs to that world of care and control, and it is one of the buildings that explain why UNESCO listed the whole mining basin in 2012. The brick architecture has a plain, solid dignity, and the sense of a community looking after its own is easy to feel.
Read the complete Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel is where the day begins. Next is Belfort met Lakenhal.
Every evening at eight o'clock, traffic stops under the Menin Gate in Ieper and buglers of the local fire brigade play the Last Post for the soldiers of the British Empire who died in the Ypres Salient and have no known grave. The ceremony has been held almost every evening since 1928, interrupted only during the German occupation in the Second World War. Walk from the gate to the Grote Markt and you come to the Cloth Hall and its belfry, a huge Gothic building that dominated medieval Flanders, when Ypres was one of the great cloth towns of Europe.
Read the complete Belfort met Lakenhal write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Belfort met Lakenhal comes up about 62 km into the recorded legs. Next is Béguinage de Bruges.
The Princely Beguinage of Bruges, Ten Wijngaerde, is the sort of place that makes people lower their voices without being asked. White-washed houses surround a grassy courtyard planted with old trees, and in spring thousands of daffodils bloom under them. A beguinage was a community where lay women lived a religious life without taking full vows, and Flanders had many of them from the thirteenth century. This one was founded around 1245 under Margaret of Constantinople, Countess of Flanders, and the UNESCO listing of Flemish Beguinages covers it, along with Diest and others.
Read the complete Béguinage de Bruges write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 123 km into the recorded legs you reach Béguinage de Bruges. Next is back through Belfort met Lakenhal.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Belfort met Lakenhal write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Belfort met Lakenhal, late in the day. Next is Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel. That is the ride.
Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel → Belfort met Lakenhal is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Belfort met Lakenhal → Béguinage de Bruges is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Béguinage de Bruges → back through Belfort met Lakenhal is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Belfort met Lakenhal → Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.