Sharon is leading this ride over The Ridgeway starting at the Foxhill car park near Swindon. Google map of start location.
Meet at 10am for a 10:15am start.
Tag Archives: 2010
Trail build video 2010-2011
Six month’s of trail building compressed in a video. This was during a time when a lot of trail was surfaced with limestone chippings in order to make it all weather.
Video: 2010 round up
A compilation of stray video and images from 2010.
Stats January 2011
Stats at end of January 2011. Figures in brackets are for the last count in October 2010.
In January 2010 we had 4,203 visits and 19,490 page views on this site. That’s around 135 visitors and 630 page views per day.
- The facebook group has 428 (411) members. After a long time of level pegging at 420 members it’s finally broken free and moved up.
- club membership is 107 (85)
- The forum has 91 (75) members
Club ride: Afan WW2
Afan is a great trail centre near Port Talbot in South Wales – just over 2hrs drive from Swindon… but well worth it.
Last time we were there we did White’s Level followed by a shortened version of The Skyline. See the ride report.
This time we’re planning on doing the WW2 trail. That’s the Skyline Trail joined to The Wall trail.
We’ll meet at 10am in the car park at the Glyncorrwg Mountain Bike Centre. If anyone has any transport issues then contact us and we’ll see what we can arrange. Trails are free but there is a parking charge.
See the MBSwindon Afan trail guide.
Ride report: Afan and Cwm Carn
Afan and Cwm Carn are well known trail centres in south Wales. I called in at both during the Christmas holiday in 2010. The Afan trip was organised by DIRT club (Facebook group, website)
Ride reports and information about Afan: White’s Level and Skyline May 2010
Ride report and information about Cwm Carn: July 2010, April 2010.
Ride report: Black mountains loop
This is another ride that I did over the Christmas holidays that I thought was worth adding as a route suggestion.
This loop in the Black Mountains (near Abergavenney) starts and finishes next to a pub and takes in two really good descents.
There was a lot of snow and ice on the day that we did it.
Google map of route. It’s moderate length at 13 miles, but it does have a fair amount of climbing.
Croft Trail New Years Eve Boogie
An evening/night ride at Croft Trails. All welcome of any ability level – no one gets left behind on our group rides.
Novice Friendly group starts a few minutes after the main group.
This is a great chance to be given a guided tour of the trails if you’ve never been before, and a chance to see the improvements if you have.
Proper off-road lights will be necessary, speak to us if you want some advice on how to get into night riding without spending hundreds! We meet in the car park for 19:30, ready to leave at 19:35ish.
We’ll probably be going to the Check Inn at Wroughton after the ride too, unless a better offer comes along 🙂
Trail build report: Tues 28th Dec 2010
The snow had finally melted and the ground was no longer frozen solid. In the morning Phil, Tony, Mike and myself (Tom) dug out the new line in the section before the triangle. Blue arrow 1 in the diagram below. The new route avoids a boggy area.
The boggy area had been fixed back in January 2009. However, the rocks that were used were frequently bypassed by riders plus the whole line of the trail was not right in our opinion (this was some original trail that we inherited).
We were joined by Mr Anon and Andy later in the day. We spent an hour clearing more trees and branches from the entrance to the triangle section. After that we spent a while marking out the approximate new route for the triangle area.
We finished off by installing our new Croft Trail sign. This says “Built and maintained by volunteers” and has the msbswindon website address on it.
Ride report: Boxing day belly buster 2010
The original plan was to meet at the Woolstone hill car park. Ice on the road meant that cars were struggling to make it up the hill though. So we decided to start from the Royal Oak pub car park at Bishopstone instead.
Rafe concocted a route up the ridgeway to Uffington castle and then on bridleways. This took us a few hours before ending back at the pub.
Despite the snow the conditions were quite warm with blue skies.
At the pub we stuffed our faces with their super sized burgers.
Original route.
