Coed-y-Brenin, Pioneer MTB Centre
Mould-breaking center has great mountain bike trails to ride today
Coed-y-Brenin in mid-Wales is a great place to go mountain biking and also has a special place in the history of the sport thanks to pioneer trail-builder Dafydd Davis.
Scotland may be stealing the headlines at the moment but Wales is where it really all began for mountain bike centres in the UK, and much of the credit belongs to one man, Dafydd Davis.
The place where the story begins is Coed-y-Brenin (Welsh for King’s Forest) a few miles north of the little town of Dolgellau in Snowdonia National Park. It was Dafydd Davis’s idea to develop purpose-built mountain bike trails here. To their credit his then-new employers, Forestry Commission Wales, grasped the potential.
In those days it was mostly picks and shovels wielded by Dafydd and any volunteers he could round up. Trail-building was in its infancy and pioneers like Dafydd had to make it up as they went along, though of course they could draw on experience of riding mountain bikes and building trails for walkers and other users. Crucially, Dafydd had a clear vision of the type of trail that would attract mountain bikers.
Evidently he got a lot of it right, because bikers soon came and continued to come in ever-increasing numbers. Today many people regularly travel several hours from the population centres of South Wales, the Midlands, Merseyside and Manchester and some come from much further afield.
Dafydd Davis is now recognised as a world leader in trail-building and his achievements at Coed-y-Brenin and elsewhere in Wales led to the award of an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2004.
Dafydd and his successors, like current mountain bike ranger Tony Griffiths, have not rested on their laurels. The trails have continued to develop to meet their needs while a new visitor centre including an excellent cafe and bike shop was opened in 2006.
For people like Dafydd and Tony, funding is always a headache. No-one pays to ride, so income depends on parking fees, cafe receipts and so on. Any major new investment is usually a partnership with many sources of funding and means many days spent in meetings when they would rather be out swinging a pickaxe or just riding.
Today Coed-y-Brenin has around 100km (60 miles) of designated routes, of which nearly half is purpose-built singletrack linked by scenic fire-roads. Click for more detail on the individual routes.
