Blocking and trashing trails is a good each way bet for arseholes who aren’t the landowner. There are three very likely outcomes for them.

1. Riders give up and go elsewhere.

2. Someone gets badly hurt by a trap and the landowner decides it is just too much hassle and does the trashing ‘properly’.

3. There is so much rancour and complaint created that the outcome is as 2.

It boils my piss, TBH, but the desire to now ‘build’ everywhere is getting out of hand in some places. There is a difference between riding and riding in trails and taking a spade to the ground and starting earthworks.

Whipping off the odd errant branch cleanly and subtly is a lot different to felling a sapling. Riding a trail until a rut appears or a natural berm is ridden in is very different from creating a 20ft gap with associated massive f-off borrow pit. Etc.

@raify. I have just seen your post. I was riding those trails for the first time this year a couple of weeks ago and had a surprise on nearly every trail! The biggest surprise was on the other side of the hill to the stream gap where a well-made wooden bridge across a ditch after a few jumps was, unknown to me totally destroyed. I was very close to a big moment there.

The thing that doesn’t make sense to me, apart from the senseless destruction that you have already pointed out, is that if this work was carried out by an approved land agent then they should have gone through the correct (and as I understand it) legal process of putting up warning signs prior to the work indicating the closure of each trail. Once the work had been carried out, the trails should have had closed signs put up at each entrance and be clearly blocked. What has been carried out is extremely dangerous as numpties like me have ridden down trails not realising that they have been closed and blocked until coming round a corner. Whoever is behind this has created more danger and damage than any trail building.

I haven’t got any contact details of the guys that built the trails, but I am more than happy to come and lend a hand in re-building when time allows me to. Although it will probably be better once we know that they’re not going to get flattened again though.

Have a search on Facebook for something like pembury builds / digs. I’m afraid I haven’t got an account so can’t find the links. Local builder I spoke to yesterday said all are welcome.