Author: Matt Hornby

Reading Time: 2 minutes It was high time for an off-road adventure after a January hiatus, so 5 of us went fairly local and met up at Macclesfield Forest on Saturday last – at least we did once the initial Google maps confusion was sorted. Amazingly though, with all expected riders well on time even this slight delay meant […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes The starting point for this months MTB away day was Trentham Gardens, Stoke-on-Trent. It was riders choice as I had two routes planned and was happy to navigate either of them. However, for two of us, Rob and myself, the starting point was Middlewich. On our way to Trentham we would meet up with Steve […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s been a while since I’ve written an off-road blog shamefully, particularly when viewed against the journalistic volume and quality of the road oriented contributors here abouts. I’ll make an excuse that our mountain bike jaunts are best illustrated with shots of a train of colourful riders swooping down dusty trails into dramatic vistas, but […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes …on Saturday 15th October we had what was nearly a perfect club MTB ride. I’d found a route on the Internet around Rivington Pike and the attendant reservoirs, which are just outside Horwich in Lancashire that looked like it was spot on for a sensible day out. Nice distance, a reasonable amount of climbing, not too […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes ‘Why is it called the Castleton Carousel?’ Nick asked me as we pushed up the fifth tasty climb of the day. My thought was it went round and round in circles, (one large, one much smaller included for a stupendous final decent back into Castleton) but as we were approching 4000ft of climbing his suggestion […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes On the face of it there’s not a lot to report about a day out at Antur Stiniog. You arrive, chuck your bike on a trailer, ride to the top of a hill in a minibus, tear-arse down to the bottom and repeat, (x15) until it’s time to go home. Or you are broken. Or […]

Reading Time: 4 minutes The dates chosen for this year’s club off roader glamping weekend coincided with the ever popular Borderland Rotary Mountain Bike Challenge, so in democratic fashion I deferred my choice of the Scottish borders for the Welsh ones and last Friday evening eight of us arrived in Llangollen for the traditional MTBing triumvirate of eating too much […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes Four of the gang rolled out to Clitheroe yesterday to take part in what was billed as an on/off road sportive organised by a cracking little Lancastrian bike shop, The Green Jersey.  You might have cottoned onto the term ‘gravel bike’ which is a new attempt for companies to part cyclists with their cash genre of […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes No, it’s not a pub, (though a pre-Christmas pub lunch is on the cards for the final off road ride of the year, see the calendar) but the names of the two MTB trails at Cannock Chase forest. Follow the Dog and the Monkey Trail. It’s only just over an hour away but for some […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes We’d postponed this ride from September so a few of our fat tyre’d brethren could join us to revisit a popular ride from some years ago. In the end there was only Eleanor who had done this route before, with Tim, Iain, Jim and myself completing the gang. The usual start time of 10am suffered […]