How long do people think it will take to ride every listed trail centre in the UK. This is taking into account work and a family life being maintained.

I fancy a challenge but not setting myself up to fail.

Depends on what you decide is a trail centre!

what are the parimeters of your quest? ride one, drive straight to another, ride that or ride one a month every weekend?
also will you ride every trail at every centre? even the blues?

… or how many KMs can you ride using trail centres only in a single 24 hr period?

How about finding out how many trail centres there are and then riding that number of laps of your nearest one? After all, they are all basically the same.

As above you need to define a trail centre. Just FC ones? Just those with a visitor centre? Everything shown as “Cycle Trail” on an OS map? There are some quite obscure ones such as Carbisdale and Balblair which are great but relatively unknown. Then there are places such as Dunkeld which have a great network of trails but nothing way marked. What about the waymarked trails around Rutland water or Bewl water?

I think you have to set the criteria before asking the question but sounds like you’d have a lot of fun whatever the criteria you decide!

I drew up a list of trail centres in the Uk a couple of years ago and got to about 70 and that was before the the Irish ones appeared – given those sorts of numbers I’m going with a long time.

After all, they are all basically the same.

didn’t take long for the first TC bashing post did it 😉

Surrey Hills is no trail centre, though has a couple of official trails. I suppose there’s no visitor centre unless you count Peaslake stores 😉

Hell, even Woking has an officially signposted ‘MTB trail’ near the centre and the town has a visitor centre 😉 . I’ve yet to work out what this trail actually is. The signs don’t lead anywhere, though there’s a walking trail with Swinley style ginger, but signs suggest it’s for walkers and buggies.

Its not a walking trail in Woking, its just the skids marks left in the dirty underpants of Surrey.

deadkenny – Member

Surrey Hills is no trail centre, though has a couple of official trails. I suppose there’s no visitor centre unless you count Peaslake stores

Hell, even Woking has an officially signposted ‘MTB trail’ near the centre and the town has a visitor centre . I’ve yet to work out what this trail actually is. The signs don’t lead anywhere, though there’s a walking trail with Swinley style ginger, but signs suggest it’s for walkers and buggies.

didn’t take long for the first TC bashing post did it

Hey, I’m just ensuring that there’s a balanced debate 🙂

I’m sure one of the mags tried this a few years ago.

These are all the trail centres and riding bases in Wales according to MB wales

Mountain Bike Wales

Although this includes BPW and Antur. Neither are TCs in my book nor consider themselves as such – if you do add those you’ll need to be up to riding some serious terrain like the Pro Line at BPW. You’ll also need to make multiple runs of the same trail as they join different sections further down the trail.

So forgetting BPW and AS and DH trails, and discounting the MTB ‘bases’ (which is a shame because you miss Brechfa) you’re left with:

Afan Forest Park – maybe 2 days of riding, but it’ll be tough it’s 100k+ of riding with 3000m of climbing.

Coed Llandegla – 1, but you’ll be repeating a lot of trail to hit all the various options

Coed-y-Brenin 2 or 3? 150k and 3200m of climb.

Cwmcarn – 1 day and the Twrch is diverted down to an hours riding max.

Nant-yr-Arian 1 if you’re very fit, 2 if you’re not.

And – Coed Trallwm & Elan Valley, which really isn’t a trail centre by any real measure.

So that’s 9ish solid days of riding to cover the Welsh bit.

How do you tackle closures? Or places like CYB where every trail is made up of every other trail?

The biggest issue here, as it is with all such things, is Glentrool.

Northwind – Member

How do you tackle closures? Or places like CYB where every trail is made up of every other trail?

The biggest issue here, as it is with all such things, is Glentrool.

IMO you’ve got to ride every metre, if that means re-doing trail so be it – BUT you don’t have to re-do trail if there’s another option.

For example, if you ride Penhydd, you can turn up the fire road before you do the very last bit back to the car park, within 100metres or so you’re back onto the climb again, short blast up the boring fireroad bit, down Bluescar and you’re back to the same point – the final bit makes up part of both Penhydd and Bluescar so you haven’t missed anyting, but you don’t have to re-do Jim Crow or the final bit and of course you wouldn’t have to do W2 and Whites and The Wall separately.

At CyB pretty much every trail includes Cyflym Coch as it’s the route from the centre to where the trails start and the route from where the trails end back to the centre.

Doesn’t help you at Llandegla though, you’ll need to do the first climb 3-4 times and Cwmcarn you’ll need to do the first climb twice.

He hasn’t said he will be riding every single trail at every single centre, he said he’ll just ride at each centre so presumably he will be happy with doing the main route or one of his choice?

Also you missed off the Marin and Penmachno

Rock up in audi, take bike off bike rack, squish the forks a bit, eat a cake, take a photo of bike propped up against the trail head sign, put bike back on car, drive to next trail centre, repeat….

can’t take that long can it?

😉

I like trail centres. And cake.

every trail at every trail centre would be a lifetime’s work. Limit yourself to a main trail at a certain description of a trail centre and it should be possible. Should be able to knock off 3 in weekend. Maybe take a year or 2 with life getting in the way.

If it was me, I’d select the hardest route at each and consider it ticked but the selection of what constitutes a trail centre is a harder question.

You could have the list made for you, and just work through the Vertebrate Trail Centre ‘guide’ book.. 67 sounds a pretty good effort! Its a bit out of date now, but at least you could have the satisfaction of crossing the pages off!

Well based on that book the answer to the original question is 1 month.

“In the course of writing this book, author Tom Fenton racked up over 1,500 kilometres of riding in one month and became possibly the only person in the world to have ridden every waymarked singletrack trail in England, Scotland and Wales.”

It takes a while!

That book’s now embarrassingly out of date as there are a load more trail centres and half the ones in the book have new trails…

It probably took closer to two months to tick them all off for the Vertebrate book. That was a month of riding every day to get the bulk of them done and then the odd trip here and there to check out the others. (Pretty good fun for ‘work’!) I think I rode pretty much every trail.(I might have skipped a couple of the green fire road ones, don’t really remember.)

I think I was doubling up on centres on a few days and rode all the trails at a couple on other days. Not trying to boast – I had deadlines to hit and was pretty fit back then. Just trying to give an indication of effort it took to do it quickly. I reckon that if you were visiting centres fairly regularly on weekends it would take a couple of years to ride them all.

That said, I’m not convinced all the centres are worth bothering with, or that it’s worth skipping some of the other riding you’d pass on the way – I’m not TC bashing, it’s just that there’s some even greater natural stuff.

Thanks for all the thoughts, I think I am going to put a list together form a book or website, then aim to work my way through it riding a couple at each centre depending on how much fun they are.

key things being to make sure it is still good fun and not a chore, otherwise what is the point.

Akin to Munro Bagging – but then it’s the idea of a list that provides motivation when it might otherwise be lacking. 😀