I’ve not been before but was thinking of traveling up from Banbury tomorrow morning. Aiming for a 10:00 am start hopefully a lot of frost would of gone by then or should I wait till the spring/ summer?..Is there a GPX file somewhere for a loop & roughly how long should I plan to get around?

Has anyone been around today?

Sun shining here today, it will be wet but not boggy.
nip in to Plush Hills in Church Stretton and get a route guide.
you should be able to entertain yourself for 3 to 4 hours with out back tracking. Then you can do mynton Batch again

I was there earlier this week, it was quite wet and slippy in places, and the fog meant we couldn’t see more than 20/30 metres at times but it was fun. It was my first time there and it took us about 2 1/2 hours with a stop for a flask of tea and cake at the top

a good route is up carding mill valley, take the right when it fork after the stream, just before you pass where it says [p] on the map at the shooting box, take the right path to go straight through and over the carpark, that takes you onto the summit. Then down 8 (minton batch), the post marking minton batch has fallen over when I was there about 3 weeks ago so you may have trouble finding it if you haven’t been before. I can’t really describe where it is because there are no other terrain features, it’s just before a large sweeping corner to the right, before the gliding club.
At the bottom find your way back to carding mill and go up again, then some swoopy fast fun down to do 11, 12 and then 14. That’ll be about 3/4 hours or so. Have fun, wrap up warm 😉

Sorry, sweeping corner to the left.

Last time I went I followed this route but changed it to descent into Little Stretton as the last big descent – http://www.theedgecycleworks.com/mtbroutes/long-mynd-long/

Ending with the descent into Little Stretton is awesome, it’s so fast. It’s no.9 on the map. After minton batch I climbed the long fire road back up to the glider club then headed down route 9!

As Jekyll said, up, do minton batch then go back up and find some other stuff. I normally drop in to the pub at the Bridges at Rattlinghop for a nice lunch too.

As for frost I was up there on Wednesday and the frost stayed in the shaded areas along with frozen puddles until the sun went down…….but was brilliant as usual. We started off at Marshbrook. Bike shop there and pub/cafe but not sure if both will be open, I would assume so.

How’d your get on tym?

Thanks for asking jekkyl..we left home later than planned so didn’t get up there til 12:30 ish. Parked outside Plush hills cycles & picked up a trail map and from there biked to Minton and turned right at the pub and followed the back lane up to the fireroad then on up to the ridge. Bit bloody cold and windy up there eh? Fantastic views. We rode the bw through the glider club/ area. A short pause at the top to adjust pads etc. & we were off heading down the Minton Batch descent. It was very very wet, in fact the top part of the trail had a river running in the sunken track…but what a blast, great enjoyable descent but it needed to be 10k in length not 3….
We then headed in to town for a grilled kebab and dropped some pennies on some new pedals at PIush. I think I’d have to spend a day there in the summer to experience a lot of the other descents and possibly find any cheeky trails.
Being honest I’d say as much as I enjoyed the descent I wouldn’t ride that ascent for the 5 minutes of descent. If there was an uplift however I’d ride there often.