Coed y brenin
It’s the UK’s original trail centre, but has it stood the test of time?
when you invite someone with a nickname like ‘Gas to Flat’ along for a day’s riding, you know what you’re getting yourself in for. Today was never just going to be a trundle around Coed y Brenin’s blue route. True to form, Lake District-based World Cup racer Adam Brayton is hucking off everything in sight. It’s an Arctic-cold day and the wind is howling a gale around the high point of the ‘Tarw Du’ trail (translation: ‘Black Bull’), but that’s not stopping the ‘Keswick Kestrel’ as he soars off the top of a rock slab, lands perfectly into the face of it and rides away clean. We watch in awe, but you can see it’s got our other riding companions – fellow downhillers Joe Smith and Matt Walker – champing at the bit.
Competitiveness runs in the veins of these racer types, and further down the trail we find Joe eyeing up a double slab line to one-up Adam. He reckons if he hits the first roll-down with enough speed, he can kicker off a tiny lump in the middle and gap into the second. It looks like a recipe for an over-the-bars for most riders, but when you’re this good you can make it look effortless – Joe even tips the bar in for extra style points. Unsung hero The ‘Y Slab’ section we’re riding is one of the newest descents at Coed y Brenin, but Tarw Du itself is the oldest purpose-built MTB trail in the country, dating back to 1996. Its creation is credited to a somewhat unsung legend of UK mountain biking – Dafydd Davies. Dafydd was the forest ranger here back in the early ’90s and he was the first to see the potential for manmade singletrack, as an alternative to boring fireroad bashing. Working with almost no support, he and a small band of volunteers moved mountains of rocks and sculpted the first part of the Tarw Du trail entirely by hand.
He then managed to convince the Forestry
Commission that what he was doing had promise and, with limited funding, the UK’s first purposebuilt MTB trail came into being – a loop that began the trail centre revolution. The early Coed y Brenin trails have an iconic style, with rocks laboriously hewn out and slotted together to make an allweather surface. It must have been painstaking work, but we’re glad of it today, given that only a few hours ago we were driving through blizzards and torrential rain, but out on the hill there’s hardly a patch of mud.
Coed y Brenin’s 38km monster, the ‘Beast of Brenin’, is typical of that style and we head out from the centre on a paved road of singletrack that keeps us on our toes as we pump for speed and catch quick pedal strokes between the rocks. Breaking cover from the trees we dive into a section called ‘Adam and Eve’, which gives us a brief respite from the rocks. Two big arcing berms lead into a series of opposing crests and we ride in a train, with Matt leading us out. Left, right, left he goes, and carves his bike into a textbook scrub over the last of the humps, with his wheels sliding off the gravel lip. After a short climb we’re right back into the techy stuff. ‘Abel’ (one of Adam and Eve’s sons, in case you don’t know your Bible!) weaves a narrow line beneath craggy outcrops – laying off the brakes requires you to be fully on the ball. It’s awesome to find such a rugged natural section at a trail centre, but what’s even more impressive is the commitment with which the boys hit it – full speed in, dipping a shoulder around an awkward jutting rock and kickering off a sketchy boulder into another narrow turn. Natural-feeling goodness One of the best things about Coed y Brenin is the way the trails sit into the landscape. Rather than gouging out a machine-built groove, the singletrack snakes between the trees and has mellowed into the lush green undergrowth over the years. ‘The
Addams Family’ is a pristine piece of trail that slices a perfect ribbon between trunks hanging with moss. We’ve got no time to marvel though, as all our attention is focused on keeping up with Joe. As one of the last remaining pros on flat pedals, the guy can corner like almost no one else. He’s hammering his bike into every turn, as if he’s trying to tear his tyre off the rim, but springing out of the apex somehow faster than he went in. The others follow suit, getting their bars as low as they can around a bucket-shaped berm. It’s rad to have sections like this at a trail centre, where surfaced trails can often feel sketchy and unsupportive at full chat. Seal of approval It’s impossible to do justice to a place like Coed y Brenin in one day – there’s just so much here. We’ve been pedalling around like maniacs and we’ve not even touched the ‘MinorTaur’ loop or the skills area. We decide to finish the day with a muck-about on some jumps. It seems ridiculous taking a bunch of the world’s best downhillers to a skills area, but everyone likes throwing a few whips and we’ve got to practise our jibbing (it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days, don’t ya know).
It turns out that most of the jumps have seen better days and are rather lip-less, but that doesn’t stop Joe going to town on the corners, while Adam sets himself the challenge to climb up the blackgraded rocky descent – his crossfit training must be paying off! We’ve all had a right laugh today. When the boys turned up we could see that they were sceptical about the idea of sticking to waymarked trails, but everyone’s got a smile on their face now. We’re sure they’ll be back to their usual pastime of railing muddy ruts tomorrow, but if Coed y Brenin’s got the approval of a world champ, a flat pedal corner destroyer and Mr Gas to Flat himself, it can’t be too bad!