Anyone else do this?

Bloody glorious ride around dusk tonight… mostly legal…. but from the upper Pooh Bridge car park I snuck the most obvious track up to Gills Lap and then across to Reeves Wood (????) and then legal again down to Crowborough Warren etc.

Why the hell are cyclists excluded from this area?

Anyone up for a number of semi erratic anti Ashdown Forest Act 1974 sporadic dusk rides this year?

S E A A F A S D R

Needs to be more catchy?

I’ll work on it!

There used to be a load of us sneaking across Ashdown Forest in the mid-to-late 1990’s until they started cracking down and the rangers got quad-bikes.

IMO as long as the ability to change the by-laws rests in the hands of the horsey-set (ie. the conservators themselves) it’s not going to be legal to ride bikes over the Forest which is a damn shame. I can never get my head around the irony that the main argument they used to use against bikes was erosion when a wet weekend of horse-riding leaves the majority of the paths and tracks impassable and forces the walkers onto the heather. They’re interested only in maintaining the status-quo: ie. the good life for themselves and minimizing people on their forest.

Gits, the lot of them.

Sounds top. Something I’d like to do at some point – whenever I go for a walk up there with the gf I usually end up ignoring her and checking out lines, hehe!

Sensible hat on now though – I would say that if you absolutely have to do it, make sure you leave no trace (i.e. go when it’s dry and when you won’t be seen like billyboy).

If anyone is ever caught, don’t get rude and argumentative as this gets fed back to the conservators and they use it as a reason not to allow bikes on the forest at all. This is what was done recently at the last meeting that took place a month or two back.

flip 8)

Wardens using quad bikes would account for a lot of the erosion I was seeing on the trails….along with horses who are probably the worst offenders.
I quite often ride with police officers so I stay legal so as not to embarass them. My lone visits are fairly erratic and if I’m late out, as I was last night, I tend to try and push a new bit of trail each time. The ban on bikes is a criminal shame because it is a beautiful place to ride

Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of peer reviewed scientific article knocking around, that found bikes cause less erosion than walkers? Or is that a myth?