TRAILCREW HAVOK BIKEPARK

A hand-cut, rider-built bike park, Havok reopened earlier this year at a new site in West Yorkshire and is still expanding

- Mick Kirkman

After a year's hiatus, Havok Bike Park is reborn. Like many other forests in northern England, Havok's old Cock Hill location took a right kicking from winter storms, such as Arwen, in 2022. In fact, so many trees were blown over that Forestry England deemed the decimated forest unsafe for riders, and the bike park found itself without a home.

Havok's team had grafted for years to build a spot and a local riding community, though, and weren't about to go the same way as the foliage. After a search for exactly what their fresh direction might look like, Havok's second coming began in May this year - literally over the road, with much of the same dig crew responsible for building it.

Grassroots, spring shoots With a local landowner having come good with a big old hill to get stuck into (he's an enduro motorcyclist, so 'gets it'), the new incarnation sees Havok run as a community interest company (CIC), with one eye on local riders and kids getting involved to build a real asset for the community. Being on "t'other side oft'road", as they say around here, has the major benefit that the tracks now face the sun and no longer lurk in a gloomy, dense, due-north plantation, where they were often too dark to ride by midafternoon in winter. The open aspect means fewer trees to slalom through, but also brings bigger views.

So, rather than slinking over slimy roots and rocks as if you were in a Welsh forest, you can now see all the lips, rollers and drops tracing their way across the Pennine hillsides.

The new spot perfectly straddles the Lancashire/ Yorkshire border in a place called Portsmouth, with the trails cutting across a boundary contested as far back as the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century.