Myself and my better half may well be heading out to Kiel, Germany for a weekend of tall-ship sailing and mountain-biking in the southern Baltic in early June. Strange combination, I know, but rather than just do the weekend we’re interested in extending the trip and possibly looking at using the bikes we’ve taken across for more action. Anyone know whether there’s much available out there? I’m thinking more cross-country than bike-parks/downhill. We’re South Downs bikers mainly, but not averse to Welsh trail centres.

I can show you some ace stuff in southern sweden if they havn’t chopped all the trees down.

Unfortunately that part of Germany is pretty flat. You could try the Baltic Sea bike way which is basically a coastline cycle trail which stretches all the way to Poland. Other than that you’ll have to drive some distance to get to some mid sized mountains.

I can help you with some places to ride in Denmark, but you need to define South Denmark to me first.
If you want to drive 1,5hour from the German border there is some nice places on the west coast North of Esbjerg.
In the 10 years i have been living in the UK they have build quite a lot of specific mtb trails. I was home last Christmas and had the bikes with us, so went to try one of them. a little video here https://vimeo.com/56563119

Thanks guys, it looks as though we’ll have to drive a far way to get some hills then. We might need a detour via the Ardennes of something similar then.

The nearest decent hills in Germany are probably the Harz mountains (quite a long way east). There will be some online GPS routes somewhere (we only had a couple of days there so haven’t got anything to offer but it did look a very promising area).

The “biggest” hills in Denmark are around Silkeborg. We found some singletrack and talking in a bike shop it sounded like anywhere in the woods was OK.

You need passage of bikes to create singletrack so areas around towns and cities might be most promising. There certainly looked to be good stuff around Gothenburg and SSWC had some fine technical XC trails within riding distance of Stockholm centre.

I think the key is going to be find some local knowledge.