I’m never quite sure to what extent this is a UK-specific phenomenon, but over the last few years trail centres have sprung up all over parts of Wales, Scotland and even the hillier bits of England.
For your average London-based mountain biker, the Surrey Hills are good regular fare, but we have to look further afield on occasion lest the attraction of those regular trails starts to wane. And when we do, trail centres make good sense, especially if you’re looking to get maximum bang for your buck for a weekend away.
Brilliant singletrack, some pretty challenging riding, depending where you go, and importantly no map-reading or trying to find that really good trail that only the locals know about. However, it’s not all good. If that’s all you end up riding, it can feel a bit sanitised, a bit too easy, a bit too path-most-travelled.
So sometimes it’s good to get back to some ‘real’ mountain biking. Although Britain is a pretty crowded little country in general, especially within sensible driving distance of the south-east of England, there are actually bits of land which are pretty remote, but still crisscrossed with the sorts of bridleways, sheep tracks and so on which can make for an excellent all-day ride.
And so it was that a merry band of London Dynamos set out for the wilds of the North Yorkshire Moors one weekend before Christmas. Big weekends away are an important part of my preparation for the Absa Cape Epic with Mike, my MarathonMTB.com team-mate. We spent a day playing around on the trails at the Dalby Forest trail centre. Chunks of the Black route there replicate the 2010 World Cup XC round that took place there, and we were pretty impressed at the stuff the pros would have been getting down on XC bikes.
But the highlight of the weekend was definitely a big Moors ride. From the cottages where we were staying, it was a bit of a drive to the start of the ride. Alternatively, it was a 30k trundle over, mostly on the road, knobblies buzzing merrily on the tarmac. Interspersed with sections of exceptionally muddy bridleway.
With the trails being all ‘natural’, there was a good bit of variety in the ride. From wide-open stony bridleways across the moors, to some excellent heather-lined singletrack on nice firm peaty soil, to some true mudfest valleys (including one where we saw two 4x4s trying to drag another out of the ditch into which it had slid).
Apart from errant 4x4s and the occasional walker, we hardly saw anyone all day, which in England is a major achievement on a Saturday when it wasn’t raining (well, not that much…).
With a slight miscalculation as to the amount of light left on a short December day, those of us who had eschewed the cars ended up riding home in the encroaching darkness, arriving back at the cottages in the pitch black. Follow that up with a bit of Yorkshire pub hospitality, local ales (Cropton Two Pints a favourite) and a big pile of fish and chips, and you have possibly the perfect mountain bike day.