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Welcome to the Routes section. This section features a selection of mountain bike ride routes from around Brighton, Sussex, the South Downs Way and the various forest locations throughout Sussex, including Friston Forest and Tilgate Forest.
This section differs from the Gallery section in that the descriptions of the routes are more detailed, and contain less images, making them more suitable for printing.
The rides below could be strung together to (so far) get from Eastbourne to Chanctonbury Ring, (once I get the Eastbourne ride properly written up), and as far as Arundel once I next go on that ride. That's a distance of about 70-80 miles of the length of the South Downs Way; I'll do my best to ride the sections of the SDW further away from my house by the end of the year.
Obviously we aim to do new bike rides during the year as well; most of these were ridden for the first time last year, for instance.
It would actually be possible to join all of these rides together and ride from Eastbourne as far as Arundel, but haven't attempted that yet.. Eastbourne to Brighton is a bit of a killer, as it's the hilliest section of the South Downs Way.
Update - 10.4.2007I am aiming to complete the whole of the South Downs Way Route in one day! Check out the training progress on the South Downs Way Randonnee page..
The other type of bike riding I do is around the various forests in Sussex.. these are mostly:
Friston Forest has a proper waymarked MTB trail which is great fun.. the bit I always tell people about is where there’s a sign saying “Warning: Steep turn and sharp descent ahead” – it’s not wrong either! We normally get around the whole route in around an hour, which is shorter than the time it takes to get there, let alone there and back! Great fun though. For this reason, I’ve actually ridden two laps of it in one visit before! It’s about 7.5 miles long altogether, and the bike shop, the Cuckmere Cycle Company, has a map available. The trail has some great singletrack and lots of varied riding – really good fun, and the ride I’m looking most forward to taking pictures of and writing about.
We also add Friston Forest on to our Eastbourne to Brighton ride, because it goes conveniently close to the South Downs Way.
Tilgate Forest is definitely more home to the downhilling (DH) biking contingent – I'm more of a cross country (XC) rider, so I don’t go there for that. However, we’ve now made up a route around the forest which uses several parts of the existing tracks.. it takes about 7 minutes of solid pedaling to get round it, and it’s great fun, and a proper workout.
This does use part of the trail that’s been built by the downhillers, but doesn’t involve any of their jumps. This is going to be a hard route to take photos on, as it’s so fast and flowing that stopping for the pics will be hard! When I get a bigger SD card for my camera, maybe I’ll attach the camera to my jacket and make a video instead!
We stay away from these venues in the winter, because the ground gets really wrecked by bike riders when it’s soggy, and for this reason it’s not much fun to ride anyway.
I’ll add in new bike rides as I do them; please feel free to submit routes, especially towards the Winchester end of the South Downs Way (or even from Arundel westwards), and I’ll ride them and put them live, with credit going to you of course.
Please remember, MTB Diary can take no responsibility for people getting lost as a result of using our route guides!
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