Gisburn Forest has just secured £ 300k of funding for a new carpark, basic trailhead, skills loops and another 1.5km of blue graded singletrack to link the new carpark into the exisiting trail network. I've posted more info and the plans for the trailhead on [url=www.pmba.org.uk/news.htm]www.pmba.org.uk/news.htm [/url]. I'll update as things develop. Work is due to start very, very soon.
There's a couple of trail closures at the moment as well, details available on [url=www.pmba.org.uk/gisburn.htm]www.pmba.org.uk/gisburn.htm[/url].
Trails looked in good shape today, Hope line has a piece of my sons knee wedged into it from this mornings ride! Pads ordered this pm!
What's the basic trailhead jon? There were plans originally for caf, toilets, bike wash etc using some existing old buildings to be converted or something like that.
Basically a brand new car park built next to Stephen Park with some landscaping and a central circular stone walled bit with information boards etc. New trails to connect and some skills loops leading off from the car park. Permenant temporary toilets were also part of the original plan. As I understand it the RDPE funding people thought the design would be better with a permenant stone built toilet block which they seemed quite keen to fund! I think these toilets may be phase two on account of there needing to be more plans drawn up and probably additional planning permissions needed. A cafe has always been a seperate element of the scheme and rests with the new tenants in Stephen Park. I think it's part of their business plans to use one of their out buildings for this, obviously the carpark needs to go in first.
The main aim of this first phase is to increase parking and provide the better facilites but it's all planned to be quite low key as that was one of the things that came back loud and clear from the survey results, people liked the fact that Gisburn isn't as developed as some of the other trail centres. I think Martin's done pretty well getting £ 300k together in less than a year in the current financial climate.
The trailhead may also help later funding applications, the more there the more the funding bodies are prepared to support an application.
Really good news 🙂
I hope some of the funding will be used to grit the trails in winter. 😉
😆