SKEM TRAILS

Thanks to Tawd Valley MTB Trails there’s now a lot more to Lancashire’s Skelmersdale than Sixties’ urban sprawl

- Jamie Darlow

The West Lancashire town of Skelmersdale, or Skem to the locals, isn’t known for its mountain biking. Developed in the 1960s, its housing estates, roundabouts and business parks were designed with an automotive future in mind. But, the town planners realised that having green areas was good for bodies and minds, so parks and woods were incorporated into the town’s design. The River Tawd cuts through the centre of Skem, providing a corridor of woodland that is home to wildlife, dog walkers, runners and, now, mountain bikers.

Built by West Lancashire Borough Council (WLBC), Tawd Valley MTB Trails opened in January this year. Its two short but sweet trails are like elongated pump tracks or super-condensed trail centre tracks, depending on your riding background. The quick succession of jumps and berms are tightly wound within an impressively small area – the ratio of features per metre of trail has to be among the highest in the country.

Hannah Murphy is a countryside ranger for WLBC and one of the people who helped initiate the consultation process for the trails back in 2019. Some kind of BMX track had originally been considered, but the council wanted to get an idea of what the local riders actually wanted before starting work.

“We brought Architrail [a trail building company] in to do the design work and to facilitate the consultations for us. The design changed quite a lot from the one that they created initially because people just wanted jumps, lots and lots of jumps. So the design was very much led by the local users,” says Hannah.

ARCHITRAIL-BUILT