Forest Of Bowland route guide: free GPX download

The Forest Of Bowland doesn’t have many trees, but it does have hills.

Dunsop Bridge, Forest Of Bowland, Lancashire

From Issue 10

Cut out the shape of the UK from the back of a cornflakes packet and balance it on a pin. When you’ve found the balance point you should have your pin stuck right in the middle of the forest of Bowland, Lancashire. In a little tourist trap of a village called Dunsop Bridge to be precise (in the phone box there if you look really carefully). This is where our route begins.

Someone on the Singletrackworld.com Forum said that Lancashire was crap for mountain biking. Being a born and bred Lancastrian I wasn’t too happy about that. Yes it’s true that I do most of my riding just over the border in the lesser county of Yorkshire but that’s only because I live on the border and anyway, most of the best trails start on my side.

In the heart of the county, just east of Preston and the M6 lies the misnomer that is the Forest of Bowland. Perhaps once upon a time there actually was a lot of forest there, but agricultural necessity has now rendered the landscape comprehensively bald of trees. That’s a shame perhaps, although it does mean that the views from the bridleways that top the big round hills are quite spectacular. And these are big hills. They are the sorts of hills you drew as a child – Steep, near vertical sides with big round tops – like a letter ‘n’ and the long route here has four of them. That’s four big climbs followed by four unique descents, each with an attraction and character of its own.

The first climb is the gentlest – The descent sublime. A long smooth grassy slope that gets progressively steeper and steeper as you near the bottom. You can safely let go of the brakes and zig-zag freely down the long trackless hillside, and as if that wasn’t reward enough, the picnic site just half a mile along the road is home to an almost permanent burger van during the summer.

The next climb is a completely different beast. All but the last couple of hundred metres are rideable, but only just. The short trip across the rounded top leads to one of the most spectacular views at the top of one of the most dangerous descents outside of the Lake District. Ouster Rake is its title on the map and it is a section of extreme, technical singletrack, which for most of its steep descent is accompanied by a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more on the right. Once again it is rideable despite our ‘legal department’ screaming at us not to admit it. Just to calm them down we urge you to push down this section [Yeah, right…]

The third climb is again nothing like the previous two. A zig-zag rock-fest that looks like it should be rideable, but get up this one without pushing and you have more than earned the payback of the fantastic singletrack descent that follows – you will have God-like respect amongst us for a start. Once again, the closer to the bottom the steeper it gets until just a hundred metres or so from the bottom you really can see down the chimney of the farmhouse that lies there and to clean it your backside will have tyre marks on it from being so far off the back of the saddle. Once through the farmyard the final climb begins, and the toughest is saved until last. If the long push to the top wasn’t enough the traverse across the top is real remote peat bog territory. Even in the middle of a summer drought it rarely dries out. The grass growing over the bogs looks deceptively firm and yet is surprisingly deep. The track is as vague as it can be without actually being invisible, which is testament to how many riders actually make it this far without bailing out on one of the farm tracks that lead back to the start. Eventually the track begins to show itself and the grind of bog dodging is soon forgotten. The rock strewn ancient track progressively forces you to concentrate harder as you pick your lines carefully for over a mile and half before finally hitting the back roads that lead to Dunsop Bridge.

Back at the start you will notice that your computer says you’ve just ridden a grand total of 19.6 miles and a valuable lesson will have been learned. Epic rides really don’t have to be long.

The Route

• 31km
• 885m ascent
• 3-4 hours approx

Don’t let the 19.6miles lull you into thinking this is a doddle of a ride – It isn’t. At the end you will feel you have done at least 30 miles. The significant safety issue that needs to be born in mind is that each of the four hills is tougher than the last. The last in particular is a navigational nightmare that will force you to scour the map and then the landscape in search of the easy to miss marker posts. In fact we recommend you take a local with you or at the very least a compass to go with that map.

North Pennines route guide: free GPX download