Berms. Drop-offs. Chain suck. Winding singletrack. Front wheel slides. Oh, how I’ve missed you.

08:00 on Wednesday found me in the car park of Sherwood Pines, mad keen to get out on G’s bike. I hadn’t stolen it, he’d very kindly lent it to me. The weather, despite portents of meteorological doom from Radio 1, was gorgeous but a bit chilly. I was looking gorgeous, but a bit chilly. I also had no idea where I was going. There’s apparently a three-year plan to create new trails and develop existing ones, and as a result everything’s pretty much in disarray. It seems that finding the trails, or indeed any information about them, is a bit of a black art.

The Forestry Commission website is pretty sparse, and merely lists an ‘Adventure Cycle Trail’ and a ‘Family Cycle Trail’. When you actually get to the forest, it seems these make up the only two waymarked trails, rated Green and Blue according to the Forestry Commission / CTC grades. Neither of those are particularly interesting, consisting of manicured tracks and fire road. The Forestry Commission website also mentions the aims and objectives of the three-year plan to “create a National Centre of Excellence“, but there’s no details of the current status. This project seems to be the cause of the disruption – the Sherwood Pines Cycles website has more detail.

The majority of the interesting stuff seems to involve the area marked on the map at the car park as “The Jungle Project”, although it’s not referred to by this name anywhere else, and there’s no indication of what’s actually there. When you find the place, there’s a sign boasting of jumps, DH runs and a North Shore-style area (“Sherwood Shore”). Directions are given to the jumps, but nothing else. In a nutshell, the jump area seems to have been around for a while, and is well used. The downhill trails are almost there, but with some more work to do. There’s a big start ramp at the top of the hill, with a few jumps on the way down but nothing too scary, technical or requiring a full-on DH rig with 9″ of travel front and back. However, there’s a few bits where lines need either clarifying, or adjusting to run a bit more smoothly. I couldn’t see any sign of the North Shore style area.

In terms of XC trails, there’s lots of singletrack throughout the forest, and it’s lots of fun, but the lack of signage is disconcerting in an area of 3,300 acres! On the plus side, there are new wooden signposts all over the place – they just need signs attaching to them now! There’s talk of a new 10km XC route being built, but I don’t think it’s finished yet; there’s certainly no signage for it (spot the theme yet?!). A sign at the car park explicitly states that there are no trails graded Red at Sherwood Pines, but I passed at least one sign for the biking “red route”, so go figure. There aren’t any proper maps of all the trails anywhere, it seems.

In summary, if you can find your way around the singletrack it’s ace, and when the rest of the trails / waymarkers are in place, it’ll be even more ace and less worrying. I had a cracking time on G’s bike (ta!), and will most definitely be heading back at some point. I’d love to claim that I’d found some kind of inspiration to turn myself into some kind of skinny XC whippet, but I’ll be honest – I found the DH runs, abandoned all pretence at going XC, and spent the next hour playing around in a gravity-assisted fashion before heading home. No shame. Oh, and if anyone from the Forestry Commission happens to read this, then please could you fix the bike wash at the main car park? Thanks.