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 Wallers it runs 251 km to Wallers; allow about 4 h 20 of riding. The stops in between: Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de, Belfort en Stadhuis and back through Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de. It crosses from France into Belgium - carry ID and check the toll rules. The line favours views over speed.
Anyone who follows cycling knows the Trouée d'Arenberg, the arrow-straight cobbled lane through the forest near Wallers where Paris-Roubaix often breaks apart. What fewer know is that the lane passes the gate of a colliery, and that the colliery is one of the jewels of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin World Heritage Site. Fosse Arenberg, with its three steel headframes and brick engine houses, closed in 1989, and a few years later Claude Berri filmed his version of Zola's Germinal here, using the pithead and the cités around it as a ready-made nineteenth-century mining town.
Read the complete Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are is where the day begins. Next is Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de.
The Grands Bureaux of the mining company at Liévin are the opposite of a pit: a big, solid brick office building where the engineers, accountants and managers ran the underground world from desks. Built in the style of company headquarters across the basin, with generous windows, a formal entrance and a clock, the building announces that coal was a serious business, with a payroll, a hierarchy and a public face. It sits in the town centre, a few hundred metres from the heart of Liévin, and it forms part of the Mining Basin that UNESCO listed in 2012.
Read the complete Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de comes up about 61 km into the recorded legs. Next is Belfort en Stadhuis.
British soldiers marching to the front in the First World War left Ypres by the road that led east towards Menen, and the gate they passed through became the Menin Gate, now a memorial bearing the names of more than fifty thousand soldiers with no known grave. Menen itself, about twenty kilometres from Ypres, sits right on the French border, on the river Leie, which the French call the Lys, and its town hall and belfry, standing on the market square, are part of the UNESCO listing of the belfries of Belgium and France. The belfry, like much of the town, was damaged in the war and rebuilt, and it remains the proud symbol of the town's civic history.
Read the complete Belfort en Stadhuis write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 126 km into the recorded legs you reach Belfort en Stadhuis. Next is back through Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de, late in the day. Next is Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are. That is the ride.
Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are → Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de → Belfort en Stadhuis is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Belfort en Stadhuis → back through Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de is 65 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Grands Bureaux de la Société Houillère de → Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.