The North is known as le plat pays, the flat land. Hills hereabout are the merest ripples, rarely rising more than a hundred yards. Mont Cassel dominates the vast Flanders plain although its altitude is just 580 feet. In the North, what appear from a distance to be mountains turn out to be huge heaps of black slag, a legacy of the coal-mining industry that long fueled the region's economy. Read on...

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