Jedi – With all due respects the Surrey Hills, in particular the part that Pitch, Leith and Holmbury Hills are found in are a honey pot for thousands of MTBers, ramblers, horse riders and other trail users every weekend and to be fair the Hurtwood Control has been very generous with the amount and scale of trail building that has been done on the area it controls up to this point, but there is a limit. This limit has, if other trail users are to be taken into consideration, been reached (with regards to manageability) and as a result a line must be drawn, at least until the current network of trails is made sustainable and (in some cases) ‘safe’.
Of course if a partnership and understanding is to be fostered between the various user groups and necessary funding and permission sought/given to turn the miles of ‘cheeky’ singletrack into something more long-term then all further building needs to be curtailed and this includes ‘shore’. Mr and Mrs Rambler rarely see ‘XC rider’, ‘shore rider, ‘DHer’, they just see ‘MTBer’. Even more rarely will they be able to tell the difference between ‘MTBer riding approved trial’ and ‘kid riding on some planks of wood nailed to some healthy trees’ and as such when the complaint goes in to Hurtwood (as it will) it will be ‘MTBers have damaged some trees and created illegal trails, con tray to the agreement in force’.
The current agreements are not about hindering ‘progression’ for a few, they are about stopping regression, a far more damaging thing for MTBers as a whole.
