I wouldn’t bother with Bedgebury any more. I go there with a five year old for the playgrounds, the singletrack’s almost completely been ruined with bad trail building and type 1 covering everything. Even the bike shop went bust!
Covert woods near Barham / Canterbury isn’t far, that’s good fun to ride.
As above, Bedgebury is OK if you have to ride some singletrack and everywhere else is a sloppy mess, but it’s a blue at best with 2 or 3 decent fun sections, but every time I go there’s another interesting bit that’s been bulldozed and turned into a 4ft wide gravel path…
Covert woods is great fun, I’m a regular there as it’s the best trails local to me, even though they’re 40 mins drive away! Lots of 1-2 min long natural enduro style trails, nothing majorly steep but plenty of roots and some small 1-2ft drops/jumps to flat. One side has about 8x 1 min long trails all in the same area, then the other side has some longer trails with bombholes, a few rooty drops etc. Plenty enough that 2 hours there and you won’t have ridden everything.
Other than that, well… Welcome to the limited choice that is Kent MTB! 🤣😁
Friston Forest is excellent, similar to covert but a longer climb and longer trails. You can do a bit of the south downs way around the forest too for some fast rough chalk doubletrack.
Closer to Maidstone you have bluebell hill which has a few trails dotted around, ranscombe park which has 3 or 4 trails, then you can make a ride out of stuff around Dover (although I’ve never ridden it), and of course you have the Surrey Hills a bit further out.
If you’re on Facebook, join us on Kent Trails. There was meant to be a Covert night ride tonight but it got cancelled, and there was a daytime ride at covert at the weekend, plenty of rides going on.
Depending what you’re used too there’s enough to keep me going until I can manage to get away to somewhere with bigger hills/better trails, Kent isn’t ideal but it’s better than a lot of places.