BikePark Wales confirms huge trail expansion plans and on-site accommodation

Bikepark Wales announces 33-year lease and huge development plans including 46 new trails, skills areas and on-site accommodation.

We are delighted to announce that the next phase of BikePark Wales has now been given the green light and work is underway to not only improve the experience for visiting riders but also to bring huge environmental benefits too!

We have signed a new lease with our landowner - the Welsh Government agency Natural Resources Wales (NRW) that secures the future of the bike park for decades to come, grants permission for a massive expansion of the trail network as well as a host of other amazing improvements.

What makes this new agreement different - and a first of its kind - is that we have also agreed with NRW that commercial forestry be prohibited within the confines of the bike park, with rental income from BikePark Wales used to rewild the woodland in which the bike park exists!  

Credit: Bikepark Wales

Rewilding: The Bigger Picture

Whilst negotiating the future of the forest with NRW, both sides agreed that mountain biking and commercial forestry are not good bed fellows when you have as many trails as we do at BPW. The intensity of trail development here means that it’s very hard - if not impossible - to extract timber without damaging trails. This has been difficult to manage during the first eleven years of BPW’s life but rather than fall out we have worked with NRW to create a new vision for how a bike park can operate on NRW land in a way that benefits everyone.

We therefore created a zone that encompasses all of our trails which will fall under a new management regime that has never been seen before. The land will be reclassified with recreation (the bike park) and conservation as the primary uses, with no commercial forestry allowed.

Credit: Bikepark Wales

It’s one thing to make sweeping statements but we wanted to go one step further and create solid plans so we are in the final stage of creating a “Future Forest Vision” which is a binding document that outlines not only our vision for the forest in 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 years but also real actions that we will undertake to help the forest become more resilient and transition back to a more natural state. In doing so, we hope to increase resistance to disease, fire and draught as well as adding to the ancient natural woodland. There will be a reduction in the monoculture or “Christmas trees” as people like to call it. In the medium term, our aim is to create both a seed bank and an arboretum, and to encourage the growth of cathedral trees. We’re not quite sure of what the forest will look like in the long term, because this hasn’t been done before, and no-one within living memory could tell us what the indigenous mountain ‘should’ look like. But we’ll find out in due course!

And of course this new plan will also lock-in masses of carbon for decades to come, will create a more natural home for our local animals and insects, and it create a better environment and ambiance for you, the visitor. We know you love mountain biking, but we also want you to love the ‘forest bathing’ as they call it in Japan. We assume that you like our trails, and we’d ask that you stop and breathe in the wild landscape that our trails meander around.

Building mountain bike trails has been shown to increase diversity within the forest too (how good is that!). Bike trails are generally small and low impact, they create breaks in the forest canopy and allow sunlight to reach the forest floor. This combined with disturbing the soil creates an opportunity for dormant seeds in the soil to have a chance and we’ve seen many smaller native species thrive on the trail edge.  

We have an amazing opportunity here for mountain biking to leave an incredible legacy for generations to come. It’s awesome to think that without visiting riders and the income they bring, this project would not happen, and the future of our forest would be very different. If we didn’t have such an amazing community of riders visiting BPW we wouldn’t have the scale to make it financially viable for NRW to move away from commercial forestry on our mountain and towards this new way of doing things. This project is 100% funded by rental income from BPW, which ultimately comes from you, the visitor. We’ve been able to harness the positive outputs of mountain biking and couple it with the forestry knowhow that NRW poses to set the forest on what we believe will be a positive and exciting trajectory for decades to come.  

Bikepark Wales

OK, but what about the trails?!

If you’ve been to BikePark Wales before, you’ll probably want to know what new trails and developments are coming your way? And here we’re very stoked to announce that our new lease also includes new trails, a shortening of our uplift track, and yes - accommodation on site! All that and we can also improve the car parking area. Planning permission is now granted, and we expect to break ground very soon on these exciting developments.

In terms of the new trails: work is well underway on the first of many! We’d love to tell you more, but we also want to hold some excitement back for you too. Expect the first of our new routes to open late summer/early autumn, with more trails opening not long after. If you want to be the first to know, then follow us on Facebook or Instagram and we’ll tease and release the news through there.

Credit: Bikepark Wales

Work has already begun on an overflow car park for 45 vehicles - there to reduce the stress on busy days - and we will be shortening the uplift road this autumn. Expect a quicker, smoother run up the hill as soon as that’s open. If you want to be the envy of your riding WhatsApp group, sign up to our newsletter and you’ll be in the loop with all our latest news as and when it drops!

It's such an exciting time at BPW and we are thrilled that years of hard work and planning behind the scenes are finally coming to fruition so we can bring loads of exciting new trails, constant improvements to your day riding at the bike park and the huge bonus of being able to enhance the environment as we go.  

We’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who has visited the bike park over the last 11 years and we can’t wait to see you over the coming months to checkout what we’ve been working on.

Thanks all!

From the BikePark Wales and NRW team.