Great Britain Mountain Biking Guidebook – Review
We are big fans of exploring new areas, and Great Britain Mountain Biking is a new guidebook to help you do just that.
Authors Tom Fenton and Andy McCandlish have put together the highlights of Great British mountain biking into one glovebox sized book, jam packed with rides, tips and maps. The book has done the rounds of the Ride.io media team over the summer and we’ve given plenty of new rides a go under instruction from the book, as well as putting to the test out local knowledge on a few of the routes to see how robust the routes are.
Vertebrate Publishing have a range of titles on offer that cover most of the classic areas in Great Britain in some detail, and also a guide that covers all of the trail centres in the UK. We’ve used the trail centre guide a few times and it’s a permanent fixture in the glove box, along side The Welsh Rivers guidebook and a packet of barley sugar travel sweets. It provides a great overview of the man-made riding around the UK and is ideal for dipping into when passing a new area.
Tom Fenton, the author behind the trail centre book has teamed up with Andy McCandlish to provide a similar overview of the “natural” riding across Great Britain. “Natural” is obviously not quite the right term as pretty much all the riding is on man-made paths, but have no fear, these are certainly not trail centres and some of the routes are long, exposed and feature awesome terrain, not a man-made lip in sight!
GB is divided up into bite-sized chunks, and each of these features at least one ride deemed to be an absolute classic in the area. There are 56 of these classic rides, each of them featuring a concise but easily followed description of the way to go, a flavour of the area and a proper Ordnance Survey map. Each area also features a number of other rides that get a brief description and an itinerary that allow you to plot your way on an OS map.
We tried a couple of routes in areas we hadn’t been to across the country and were impressed with both the quality of the riding and the ease with which we could follow the routes. While you could get away with using just the description of the route to get round, most of these routes take you into places where being able to read an OS map is not only useful, but important for staying safe. If you can’t read an OS map, that’s your loss because you are missing out on some of the best riding this island has to offer.
As well as the routes, you also get a bit of info on the local trail centres and details of things like the best local pubs, accommodation and so on. The style of the guides and the quality of the information is superb and the volume of research (and riding) that has gone into the book is pretty evident. While obviously restricted by only being able to publish legal routes, hints are left here and there for the reader to follow up at their leisure, and may well lead to further good times…
This is a really well put together book that works as well on the coffee table as it does in the glove box of the car, and is a really useful tool for those of you looking to put together something more than a regular trail centre loop, or for those who like to try new areas of the country.
RRP £25
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