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The 2022 Ride Bristol Survey is now open. Tell us about your riding experiences, share what you think we can do to improve riding for everyone in and around Bristol. We’re listening…

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I just filled it in. Picnic bench has just been diggered. Not sure what will be happening there now, but it’s a massive loss. Hopefully we’ll get some new tech trails but nothing will happen without support.

Done. I was at the last Ride Bristol meeting and am keen to continue to support the team – however, I think it’s going to be a hard battle given a range of challenges.

If we can take the heat out of the whole situation and find a way to maintain the ‘old’ status quo and largely co-exist un-noticed and not impeding each other, that’s my preferred approach.

In one way, Picnic Bench going IS a shame, but in other ways it isn’t – it was absolutely daft for it to appear on the face of that hill and be so obvious – hopefully the traffic in the woods will calm down significantly and we’ll return to the locals quietly and respectfully using the trails.

Following the FoD off-piste lead of removing all the Strava and TrailForks segments will also help massively.

Yeah I’ve filled it in today.

Picnic bench has gone now I reckon – they’re preparing it for replanting of native species so I’d assume they’d fence it off from the top or something like that. It wouldn’t be good for a wild trails perspective if new ones got built cheeky through there and disrupted / destroyed the new planting.

I’m in broadly the same place as Neil – hoping that the old established wild trails remain and go back to being known less well and kind of ignored / tolerated. Everything I’m hearing suggests natural England / FC / National Trust aren’t interested in accepting wild trails in Leigh Woods sadly.

Same on Mendip actually. Loads of wild trails shut down because Ride Mendip has been allowed a couple of legit ones.

The old status quo of ‘I see no trails’ was as good as it was ever going to get.

Some of those trees were my friends. [/emo lotr]

Same on Mendip actually. Loads of wild trails shut down because Ride Mendip has been allowed a couple of legit ones.

The old status quo of ‘I see no trails’ was as good as it was ever going to get.

Yeah, possibly, although lockdown madness may have played a part too? Certainly Leigh Woods cheeky traffic increased massively during and after lockdown to the point that it was hard to ignore. I don’t know when the Mendip trails were chainsawed, but yes, doesn’t encourage dialogue – small carrot followed by big stick.

Done – thanks. I tend to stick to the trails at AC/LW, so would be happy for more marked trails.

Completed, but can’t really see much change over in Leigh Woods, Ashton or 50 acre, reality is that Bristol is a great city with access to lots of stuff, but not really got many decent trails.