Reviews for Glentress Mountain Bike Trails

Summary:
fantastic trail centre! i love riding here!

Review:
amazing all round place! i love riding here and need more time here!

Summary:
A good and easily accessible trail centre that struggles to live up to the reputation and tyre-fall

Review:
"The home of mountain biking in Scotland" is a self fulfilling prophecy; the trails are busy and wellworn, the car parks stuffed to bursting at the weekends.

Well worth a visit but has been so over-hyped it can never hope to live up to the reputation.

The trails are good and there is a reasonable degree of variety but the numbers of riders, even on a week day, make the place feel small and claustrophobic. Trail maintenance and development is not to the standard one would hope for.

At the main car park there is a coffee shop, bike shop and changing facilities, however the Buzzard's Nest is less well serviced having only some grotty port-a-loos; this will be changing in the near future as the site has been leased/sold to a boutique eco-lodge holidays company.

Summary:
Love this place.

Review:
Absolutely great trail centre with something for everyone from a gentle green through to an orange jump line. Plenty of hidden trails which aren't on the map to discover, a bike shop, cafe, showers and a campsite. Highly recommended!

Summary:
Fast and flowing, absolutely brilliant

Review:
During a 2 day trip to Peebles in March I rode this 16k trail first and loved just about every minute of it. Don't be put off thinking oh it's just a blue, having ridden plenty of locations all over the country I'd say this place is bordering on a red. There is plenty to keep you entertained and I would happily ride this place time and time again. All the climbs are rideable and I was constantly having a right laugh, I rated the blue above the Glentress red I fact! Shame the car park was £5 for all day.
I rode the Glentress red the same day after lunch and the Innerleithen red the next day before a 200 mile drive home so see my reviews for those venues too.

Summary:
Another Great Trail at Glentress

Review:
I love the Red so much that despite having biked at Glentress quite a bit I had never got round to doing the black. In truth I did not fancy biking it alone as you are a long way from the road if things go wrong up there so when my bike club ‘the Woolybacks’ touted a trip up there I jumped at the opportunity. I had definitely missed out as the black is another excellent trail to boost Glentress’s credentials as a top notch Mountain Biking Centre.

The black is not a great deal more technical than the red but is a lot more arduous. To be honest a 30 km trail climbing up to 600 metres at it highest point is always going to be hard work but the big climb (Tower Ride and Shieldgreen Kipps) really is a grind. One of the technology enthusiasts riding with us said the height gain in this section was 227 metres over 3.1 kilometres so if you ride all the way up you are doing well. After the shelter there is a brief respite as you descend Britney Spears then a mercifully short but sharp uphill to the mast which marks the 600 metre high point. You should take a minute or two at the mast to admire the view or more likely shelter from the rain, don more clothes and scoff a bar or two as we did. Whatever you do, you definitely owe it to yourself to be fresh for the next bit as there follows a peach of a descent down Shane McGowan and Leithen Door which must go on for 10 minutes or so all told. The trail is variously natural and armoured but all of it is quality. If you put your mind to pumping the trail and flowing you barely have to peddle during this whoop of a descent. In fact you mostly descend by stages until the bottom of the redemption climb at about 240 metres.

After Redemption there was a diversion in place which cut out probably the last 2 or 3 kilometres of the black but I will certainly be back to do the lot as soon as I can. I think as a thrill ride the descent to climb ratio of the red is hard to beat and you could blast round it in about 1 ½ hours. The black is realistically 4 hours or so and a more serious undertaking but I loved it.