CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. 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 Denain it runs 62 km to Denain; allow about 1 h 07 of riding. It goes by way of Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage, Terril 140 and back through Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Climb the Renard slag heap near Denain and you are standing on two centuries of work. Terrils are the waste rock hauled out of a mine in wagons and tipped, one load after another, until the pile became a hill. This one, the Fox, lies barely a kilometre and a half from the middle of Denain, a town of twenty-one thousand people that grew fat on coal and steel. It is named after the Renard pit, and it was down the Renard pit in 1884 that Émile Zola was lowered while he researched Germinal, notebook in hand, listening to the men who worked the seam.
Read the complete Terril Renard write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Terril Renard is where the day begins. Next is Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage.
Coal made this corner of northern France, and coal left it with a landscape unlike anywhere else in the country: slag heaps rising like black pyramids from the fields, pithead frames standing over old shafts and long rows of brick miners' houses lining the streets of every town. The Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin was listed by UNESCO in 2012, and the Cités du Champ Fleuri et du Garage, near Masny and Lewarde, are among its typical housing estates, built by mining companies to house workers and their families close to the pits.
Read the complete Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage comes up 17 km in. Next is Terril 140.
Rising out of the flat fields north of Douai, the black, cone-shaped hill of Terril 140 is not a natural feature at all: it is a heap of mining waste, the spoil left over from decades of coal extraction. The mining basin of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, listed by UNESCO in 2012 as a cultural landscape, is studded with hundreds of these terrils, some flat-topped, some pointed, and together with the pitheads, workers' housing and railways they tell the story of an industry that shaped the region for nearly three centuries.
Read the complete Terril 140 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
34 km in you reach Terril 140. Next is back through Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage, late in the day. Next is Terril Renard.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Terril Renard write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Terril Renard. That is the ride.
Terril Renard → Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage is 17 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage → Terril 140 is 17 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Terril 140 → back through Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage is 17 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Cités du Champ fleuri et du Garage → Terril Renard is 17 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.