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.
From Bully-les-Mines it runs 159 km to Bully-les-Mines; allow about 2 h 31 of riding. The stops in between: Monument à Madame Declercq, Cité Barrois, Chevalement de la fosse Dutemple and back through Cité Barrois. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
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 Monument à Madame Declercq.
Oignies is a small town in the Pas-de-Calais, at the edge of the old coal basin near the border with the Nord, with a monument at its heart to the people who lived and died by the pits.
Read the complete Monument à Madame Declercq write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Monument à Madame Declercq comes up about 24 km into the recorded legs. 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.
about 48 km into the recorded legs you reach Cité Barrois. Next is Chevalement de la fosse Dutemple.
A steel tower with a big wheel at the top: once you have seen one headframe, you start to spot them all across the north of France, but each one marks a place where men went down into the dark. The headframe of the Fosse Dutemple, between Valenciennes and Petite-Forêt, is one of the survivors, kept as part of the UNESCO-listed Nord-Pas de Calais mining basin. Under it, cages once dropped miners hundreds of metres to the coal seams; now it stands as a monument, its pulleys still against the sky.
Read the complete Chevalement de la fosse Dutemple write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Chevalement de la fosse Dutemple, about halfway. 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 sits at 101 km, about halfway. Next is back through Monument à Madame Declercq.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Monument à Madame Declercq write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Monument à Madame Declercq comes up about 136 km into the recorded legs. 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.
Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel closes the day.
Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel → Monument à Madame Declercq is 24 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Monument à Madame Declercq → Cité Barrois is 24 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Cité Barrois → Chevalement de la fosse Dutemple is 31 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Chevalement de la fosse Dutemple → back through Cité Barrois is 31 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Cité Barrois → back through Monument à Madame Declercq is 26 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Monument à Madame Declercq → Dispensaire Société de Secours Mutuel is 24 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.