Outta the Archive: Shropshire route guide from 2007

“We show you round some of the best mountain biking in the country. It must be, Benji says so.”

From the Archives – Singletrack Issue 37 – 2007

Words and pics Benji Haworth

Up, lad, up, ‘tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
“Who’ll beyond the hills away?”
Oh whence, I asked, and whither?
He smiled and would not say.
And looked at me and beckoned,
And laughed and led the way.
And with kind looks and laughter
And nought to say beside,
We two went on together,
I and my happy guide.
By blowing realms of woodland
With sunstruck vanes afield
And cloud-led shadows sailing
About the windy weald,
By valley-guarded granges
And silver waters wide,
Content at heart I followed
With my delightful guide.
– ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by Alfred Edward Housman.

Shropshire has the best riding in the UK. There, I’ve said it. I’ve not ridden everywhere in the UK but it safe to say I’ve been around a bit. And this is the conclusion I’ve come to so far. It’s only my opinion – I’m not sure how you could go about proving it. Nor what the point of proving it would be anyway. You’ll just have to go there and try it for yourself I guess. I feel quite confident in predicting that you won’t regret it if you do.

Having said that, it’s not technically my favourite place to ride in the UK (that honour will forever go to the Yorkshire Dales). But for the actual experience of being on a mountain bike zipping along a trail, Shropshire is where I head for. More specifically, it’s Church Stretton I head for. The trails on the fabulous Long Mynd seem to have the perfect formula of gradient and width and surface.

The climbs are shorter – and hence steeper – than the descents and offer some serious challenges to even the most experienced riders. Fit riders won’t mind the gradient but may struggle on the technical sections. More skilled riders will enjoy the technical bits but chances are their calves and lungs may give out before reaching the top.

The descents are simply perfect. My favourite ones all follow a similar narrative. Flat, wide and short-grassed at the top – it’s best not to hurry these sections, instead savour the ‘calm before the storm’ feeling of anticipation. Then all of a sudden the trail gathers itself into singletrack and dives off to the left or right and you’re off – it’s like cresting over the zenith of a rollercoaster. Whoosh! Most of the time the trail is just about wide enough to go very, very fast along (but at the same time narrow enough to make it feel very, very fast). However every now and then it narrows or curves or gets rocky – sometimes all at once – and you have to deal with it. Panic or try to haul brakes and you’ll come a cropper. Confidently commit to it and you’ll fare better. Suffice to say, you have to keep your wits about you.

Even though they are intense and fun (intensely fun?) the descents still feel like they go on for a decent amount of time. There are very few gates or stiles breaking up them up (I can’t remember any actually but I may be wrong).

From the top ‘Gliding Club’ road all the way down to Stretton-level it’s an uninterrupted feast of exhilarating mountain bike riding. Some descents are probably only five minutes long but because they’re such a sensory and adrenaline overload they feel much, much longer. A bit like the slo-mo bullet-dodging bits in The Matrix. If you haven’t ridden these trails before I almost envy you. I vividly remember the first time I got shown round here. It was as if I’d finally found the riding I’d always been unwittingly looking for since I started mountain biking.

Having said that, it’s always a joy to take someone to these great trails and watch them experience it for the first time. It’s not skiving, it’s work.

For the purposes of this feature it was my duty to take Sim down to Church Stretton for a midweek ride on all the best stuff there. Technically we only needed to ride long enough to get a decent amount of useable pictures but there was no way I wasn’t going to ride from dawn ‘til dusk.

If there’s one thing I hate whenever being shown new trails it’s having someone overly pre-describe the trail to me. It ruins the thrill of riding a trail ‘blind’. You only get one chance to ride a trail new and more often than not it ends up being the best time you ever have riding it. Not the fastest, nor the cleanest – but the most intense (there’s that word again).

So apart from the usual ‘watch out for walkers’ caveat, I left Sim in the dark as to what to expect. I occasionally looked back to check his progress and could see he was dealing with things just fine – probably much better than if I’d planted seeds of doubt or worry in his head by warning him about ‘that rocky drop off’ or ‘that washed out edge’.

We were exhausted by the time the light began to fade and a respectable amount of trails had been ticked off the list. It had been really very satisfying indeed to be passing on the favour that had been passed on to me several years before. So here we are passing the favour on to you lot. You lucky bleeders.