LUKE Skywalker would understand.
He would know the way that you have light and dark sides to your personality. One part prompting you to do good things, the other dragging you towards evil deeds, unfortunately riding footpaths is definitely giving into the dark side.
Now I’m not naturally a bad person.
Normally I find it extremely difficult to break the law in even a very minor way without breaking out in a cold sweat, believing that my life will quickly go the way of Tim Robbins in the film, ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ And before you can say ‘Where’s the soap?’ I’ll be sharing a cell with a grade A psychopath who thinks I’ve got a ‘real pretty mouth’.
But sometimes, just sometimes, I feel the urge to do something ‘wrong’.
And like many other mountain bikers out there, that ‘wrong’ is usually riding footpaths, which, providing the conditions are right, I’ll ride without batting so much as an eyelid.
Deep down I’m sure that some part of me knows it’s bad and suggests that I should feel guilty. This is all well and good, but the rest of me is having so much fun that the law-abiding part of me inevitably gets wrestled to the floor and has it’s windpipe stood on by my dark side.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t derive any particular, perverse pleasure from riding footpaths (ooooh trespassing, aren’t I evil?) to me they are just new trails waiting there to be explored.
Now to some MTBers I am probably a very misguided person. In their eyes I undoubtedly tarnish the reputation of the whole sport, causing irreparable damage to relations with ramblers and landowners alike. I don’t entirely disagree with their arguments here – after all, charging full pelt along singletrack paths in the middle of summer isn’t the cleverest move in the world – but as I believe I don’t do any harm I felt I ought to give my reasons.
I live on the fringes of Greater Manchester, pretty close to a section of the Pennine Way that provides an ideal link from the end of one bridleway to another. It’s a well defined, hugely underused piece of path that skips across the top of the moors that, best of all, is well surfaced. Round here the very tops of the hills are almost without exception, peat bogs which make riding deeply unpleasant in the winter. In fact, most of the time it’s not worth the effort; it’s no fun churning on for mile after mile through axle-deep, treacle-coloured porridge that clings and sucks at your wheels. To be honest it doesn’t do the environment the greatest good either.
As it happens, a bridleway begins at the same point as this section of Pennine Way. This isn’t surfaced at all and in winter a large part of it is either a muddy stream or a swamp.
So which is the lesser of the two evils: the gravel footpath or the unsurfaced peat-bog bridleway?
There rights and wrongs to both, but you only have to look a few miles to the north and see the mess the M62 makes of the landscape to wonder what all the fuss is about.
As to the accusation of upsetting other trail users, personally I never, ever ride footpaths if there’s the remotest chance that they might be busy. For instance a Peak District footpath on an August Bank Holiday is a world away in terms of aggravation from a footpath somewhere in the South Pennines on a wet Sunday in November. It’s a world away in terms of enjoyment too. Stopping every 100 yards to let disgruntled walkers go past rather defeats the object of riding the path in the first place.
If you’re going to ride footpaths then you quickly learn to do it as unobtrusively as possible.
There is a path I know in Sheffield that’s around 4 to 5 miles of singletrack playtime: littered with drop-offs and steep, challenging trail sections. The downside is that you can almost guarantee that every Sunday morning it is going to be rammed to the gills with dog walkers and is therefore best avoided.
But put in the effort and get out of bed a few hours earlier and there’s not a soul to be seen – it’s just you and the early morning sunshine. Another Peak District trail – Shed Door to its friends – has almost legendary status amongst my friends and I, despite being a footpath. Again you’d never choose to ride it at busy times but it’s such a worthy trail that it’s no hardship to get up at 5 in the morning and be out on the trail before anyone else has had a chance to stir. Tread lightly, go quietly and you can almost ride where you like. Having said all that, one word of caution. A friend, known only as James, was out on the moors near Sheffield one early afternoon in the middle of winter. It was a cold, grey day and there was barely a soul around as he came close to Redmires reservoirs.
Here you have the option of either descending along the road or on a very quiet footpath that ends in 300 yards of rocky singletrack. Believing that there would be no one around, James set off along the footpath and as expected, met no one. Until the last 300 yards that is.
He rounded a corner at full tilt only to find two people walking up the path towards him. He slewed to a halt and stood at the side of the path in the faintly embarrassed fashion of mountain bikers everywhere who know they’ve been doing something wrong and have been caught at it.
It was only as they got closer that it became apparent that he now had an apoplectic Peak Park ranger coming towards him with a slightly startled, visually impaired man in tow!
Dom Perry
