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.
154 km from Roost-Warendin to Roost-Warendin, about 2 h 47 of riding. The stops in between: Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi, Beffroi de Béthune, Terril 34 and back through Beffroi de Béthune. The line favours views over speed.
Roost-Warendin, Waziers and Râches sit just north of Douai, where the old Scarpe floodplain met the coal seams, and the Belleforière mining ensemble is one of the clusters that shows how a pit site was organised. Shafts, buildings, workers' housing and spoil heaps were laid out together, with the railway linking them all, and in a few places the ensemble survives well enough that you can read it on the ground. Part of the regional mining landscape listed by UNESCO in 2012, it is a good example of how coal companies planned whole villages around their extraction.
Read the complete Ensemble minier de la Belleforière write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ensemble minier de la Belleforière is where the day begins. 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.
Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi comes up about 23 km into the recorded legs. Next is Beffroi de Béthune.
The belfry of Béthune has been standing in the middle of the Grand Place since the fourteenth century, and it has survived more than most of the buildings around it. In 1918 the town centre was almost completely destroyed by German shelling, and the square was rebuilt in the 1920s in a mix of Flemish and Art Deco styles, with tall, ornate façades in brick and stone around the old tower. The belfry, a symbol of the town's ancient freedoms, is part of the UNESCO listing of belfries of Belgium and France, and climbing its stairs gives a fine view over the rooftops and the flat land around.
Read the complete Beffroi de Béthune write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 56 km into the recorded legs you reach Beffroi de Béthune. Next is Terril 34.
A terril is a slag heap, a mountain of waste rock dumped beside a coal mine, and in the flat land of northern France these man-made hills are the closest thing to relief for miles around. Terril 34 is one of hundreds that dot the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, a UNESCO site since 2012, which recognises not only the heaps but also the pithead frames, miners' housing estates, schools, churches and railway lines that made up the landscape of coal mining in the region for nearly three centuries. This one sits near Norrent-Fontes and Lillers, at the western end of the basin, where it meets the chalk hills of Artois.
Read the complete Terril 34 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Terril 34, about halfway. Next is back through Beffroi de Béthune.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Beffroi de Béthune write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Beffroi de Béthune sits at 101 km, about halfway. 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.
back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi comes up about 131 km into the recorded legs. Next is Ensemble minier de la Belleforière.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Ensemble minier de la Belleforière write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ensemble minier de la Belleforière closes the day.
Ensemble minier de la Belleforière → Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi is 23 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi → Beffroi de Béthune is 33 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Beffroi de Béthune → Terril 34 is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Terril 34 → back through Beffroi de Béthune is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Beffroi de Béthune → back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi is 25 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Paysage et ensemble miniers d’Auchy-les-Mi → Ensemble minier de la Belleforière is 23 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.