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Winter wonderland in the Campsie Fells (Route 18)

The region’s trail centres are immensely popular with good reason, providing excellent facilities and miles of quality trails with innovative features and graded, waymarked routes that provide entertaining and challenging rides for various abilities. While providing a brief overview of what the region’s trail centres have to offer, this guidebook focuses on ‘cross-country’ trails that stitch together a combination of long-distance paths, country lanes, forestry and farm tracks and old drovers’ roads to make the best of the off-road potential in the region.

Unlike in England, Wales and Northern Ireland where there’s a system of designated footpaths, bridleways, byways and other rights of way, Scotland has a statutory right of access for walkers, cyclists and horse riders. This is a good thing – except for when it comes to looking at maps to see where you can go with your mountain bike. Some paths, tracks and trails are marked on OS maps, but by no means all of them; furthermore, where a bridleway marked by long green dashes will indicate a rideable route on a map of, say, the South Downs, you have no way of knowing whether that tempting-looking track marked on an OS map of Ayrshire is rideable or not. That’s where this guidebook comes in.