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.
A 162 km round trip from Mazingarbe - roughly 2 h 40 in the saddle. On the way it passes Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt, Cités de Guesnain, Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are and back through Cités de Guesnain. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Terril 49 rises above the fields between Vermelles, Mazingarbe and Noyelles-lès-Vermelles, one of the dozens of spoil heaps that punctuate the landscape of the Gohelle. Like many of them, it has gone green, with trees and scrub covering slopes once black and bare, and it has become a refuge for wildlife in a landscape of intensive farming and urban sprawl. Lizards, rare insects and birds of prey thrive on the warm, dry slopes of the terrils, which retain heat like stone.
Read the complete Terril 49 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Terril 49 is where the day begins. Next is Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt.
Libercourt is a young town by French standards. It grew in the early twentieth century around a coal company's pits and a railway line, on land that had been farm and marsh, and the planners laid it out from scratch, with straight streets, a station and cités of brick cottages in tidy rows. Many of the miners who filled them came from Poland, recruited in large numbers between the wars, and Polish names, church services and recipes marked the mining villages of the north for generations.
Read the complete Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt comes up about 30 km into the recorded legs. Next is Cités de Guesnain.
A kilometre down the road from the workers' housing of Guesnain stands the best place in France to understand what coal really meant. The Centre Historique Minier at Lewarde occupies the old Delloye pit, which closed in 1971, and it walks you through the whole life of a mine: the lamp room, the showers where miners hung their clothes on chains up to the ceiling, the stables for the pit ponies, and a reconstructed gallery underground where you hear the noise of the picks and the creak of the props. Come here first, and every terrace and terril you pass afterwards will make more sense.
Read the complete Cités de Guesnain write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 59 km into the recorded legs you reach Cités de Guesnain. Next is Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are.
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, about halfway. Next is back through Cités de Guesnain.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cités de Guesnain write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Cités de Guesnain sits at 100 km, about halfway. Next is back through Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt comes up about 135 km into the recorded legs. Next is Terril 49.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Terril 49 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Terril 49 closes the day.
Terril 49 → Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt is 30 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt → Cités de Guesnain is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Cités de Guesnain → Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are is 24 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Paysage et ensemble miniers de Wallers-Are → back through Cités de Guesnain is 23 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Cités de Guesnain → back through Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt is 29 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Paysage et ensemble miniers de Libercourt → Terril 49 is 28 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.