It appears that Mountain Biking is discouraged in England (outside the Trail Centres).

Everywhere else is just there for the grumpy walkers really.

3 gates? Jeez, you’d never make it past 2 miles in the lakes!. 🤣

Would anyone say the number of decent trails is on the rise or the decline these days ??

Even if you discounted trail centres, there are far more good trails now than there was when I started biking 15 years ago, no doubt about it.

The fences really annoy me, when you have to lift a bike over a fence to ride a section of trail it really does spoil things, a lot. If a good section of trail gets a fence put through it, that alone puts me off riding it.

I have an unwritten rule I set myself when I plan a route: 3 Gates/Styles to lift the bike over is the MAX on any ride in a day.

This was most apparent on my last ride, I had already reached my maximum of 3 and was getting near the end, the shortest route back involved 2 styles, but I choose the longer route with more climbing (even tho I didn’t feel like it) because I’d already done my 3 maximum carries…

Would anyone say the number of decent trails is on the rise or the decline these days ??

Are Mountain Bike routes in decline ? Are the top routes getting worse ? There seems to be more sanitisation than ever before, and the number of Gates and Styles being implemented into Trails which used to flow well throughout, has been on the up, during the 4 years I’ve been doing it.

Thank God we’ve got trail centres to fall back on, but really don’t like restricting myself to just these. There are so many good rides that aren’t at Trail Centres and they don’t all involve as much Driving to get there.

Not sure if serious….

Some more bad news…

Friend of mine was riding in Tilberthwaite and at the the bottom there is a sign with proposed works extent and time frame of 3 months!!!

Cheers!

I.

I was at the Lakes Bike Festival this weekend and was heading down the 3 Rivers descent and at the top of the sanitised section there were a couple of walkers so I stopped to have a chat. Those two weren’t happy at the “improvements” either – the increased speed of bikers would mean greater risk of conflict. They, and those of us riding, didn’t think the surface would last the winter and thought it a waste of time and money.

Friend of mine was riding in Tilberthwaite and at the the bottom there is a sign with proposed works extent and time frame of 3 months!!!

Whereabouts? They’ve already sanitised/flattened parts of the byway between High Tilberthwaite and Little Langdale.

from what i’ve heard they are doing more work on the same one.

Don’t quite understand this. Rode it after the first set of ‘works’ and it is now easy and pretty untechnical up from High Tilberthwaite, certainly no problem for a quad or a landy. They have also filled a couple of the the deeper runnels higher up on the LL side. The justification for the works was that the farmer at HT was having trouble getting to his stock because of the 4×4 damage.

The bedrock section lower down on the LL side has always been like that.

probably going to flatten the bedrock sections, won’t be worth riding then. we didn’t tend to ride it much anyway though as a way to get back to little langdale we usually would carry on then go up by a big old quarry and descend down the cathedral path.