With their imagination, creativity and hard graft, trail builders are the bedrock of our favourite riding spots. We went to meet some of the UK’s best – the men behind three iconic Welsh bike parks
Words Steve Thomas
With its majestic mountains, fabled forests and legendary landscapes, Wales is a country rich in mythology and tales of dragons and warrior princes. Now, there’s a new chapter of Welsh folklore being written, or rather carved, on its hillsides by passionate trail builders.
It was back in the mid ’90s that dedicated riding spots started to become a reality for UK mountain bikers, and the ‘grand trail wizard’ who made that once-unimaginable dream come true is Dafydd Davis, a Welshman who’s arguably the father of British trail building. Dafydd’s vision was to create a network of trail centres, which he did in style, beginning with Coed y Brenin in Eryri/ Snowdonia. In addition to these popular venues, Wales is now home to many excellent gravity-fed, privately-run bike parks.
We visited three trail-building maestros to find out how their minds (and spades) conjure up these magical adrenaline-infused ribbons of dirt...
dan atherton CREATOR OF dyfi bike park
The leading line-layer of the all-conquering Atherton family moved from the South West to Wales with his siblings many years ago. After a near-lifelong obsession with building trails and jumps, Dan – or Athy, as he’s known – created the extreme downhill track known as Hardline. In its blood-stained skidmarks of success, he went on to create the 650-acre Dyfi Bike Park.
Having hand-carved trails here for years, Athy knows what to focus on when digging Welsh soil. “Building in Wales is different to anywhere else,” he tells us. “Ideally, you’d want a drain on both sides of the track, but that’s not always possible. The aim is that the tracks should run as well in the wet as in the dry, and that’s hard, especially when it comes to jumps. So, we build for the wet, and people brake a bit in the dry.”
Since opening up his trails for all to ride, Athy has found that keeping on top of the Welsh water margin is an eternal battle. “Dyfi Bike Park is actually built on a fairly mellow gradient, so drainage is even more important,” he explains. “In lots of places, the only way to keep the track well-drained was to dig down to the bedrock, and that could mean shovelling through a metre of bog.
“Bike parks are actually really hard to maintain, com
