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.
307 km from Besançon to Besançon, about 5 h 12 of riding. On the way it passes Le Locle, Forêt de la Bettlachstock and back through Le Locle. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 900 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It crosses from France into Switzerland - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
71 km on Grand Tour of Switzerland.
Besancon sits in a tight loop of the Doubs river, almost an island, and above the loop a great rock rises more than a hundred metres. On top of it stands the Citadel, the fortress that the military engineer Vauban built for Louis XIV after the king captured the region from Spain in 1674. It is one of the twelve fortified sites that UNESCO listed together in 2008 as the Fortifications of Vauban, and it is a fine example of his work, with thick walls, bastions and long ramparts that follow the line of the rock.
Read the complete La citadelle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
La citadelle is where the day begins. Next is Le Locle.
Le Locle, high in the Swiss Jura near the French border, is a town built for making watches. After a series of fires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was rebuilt on a grid of parallel streets, with houses and workshops designed to let maximum light into the rooms where watchmakers worked at their benches. The town, with neighbouring La Chaux-de-Fonds, was listed by UNESCO in 2009 as an example of urban planning shaped entirely by a single industry. Tissot was founded here in 1853, Zenith in 1865, and many smaller firms continue the tradition. Daniel JeanRichard, a goldsmith who is said to have founded the Jura watch industry, worked here in the eighteenth century.
Read the complete Le Locle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Le Locle comes up about 76 km into the recorded legs. Next is Forêt de la Bettlachstock.
Above the watchmaking towns of Grenchen and Bettlach, the first chain of the Jura rises like a wall out of the Aare plain, and on its steep southern flank grows the beech forest of the Bettlachstock. In 2021 it became one of the Swiss components of the UNESCO Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, a serial site that stretches across the continent to show how beech spread after the last Ice Age. What makes this patch special is that it has been left largely to itself for decades, on slopes so steep and rocky that nobody bothered to log them hard, and so the trees grow old, fall, rot and feed the next generation.
Read the complete Forêt de la Bettlachstock write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 147 km into the recorded legs you reach Forêt de la Bettlachstock. Next is back through Le Locle.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Le Locle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Le Locle, late in the day. Next is La citadelle.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete La citadelle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at La citadelle. That is the ride.
La citadelle → Le Locle is 76 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Le Locle → Forêt de la Bettlachstock is 71 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Forêt de la Bettlachstock → back through Le Locle is 85 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Le Locle → La citadelle is 75 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.