TAR, VERY MUCH

We head to Tarland Trails in Aberdeenshire, a masterclass in modern trail building that brings bike park thrills to Scotland

The winter of 2021/2022 was brutal. Over the course of four months a total of seven huge storms hit mainland Britain, causing widespread destruction, with perhaps nowhere harder hit than Aberdeenshire. Trees were levelled in their thousands and the county lost much of its trail network. That’s bad for riders of course, but the aftermath for the local area and the businesses that rely on a steady flow of mountain bikers was much worse.

From the wreckage though, green shoots began to emerge in the shape of the Tarland 2 Trails. The Scottish government committed £350k towards finishing the new project, which in turn encouraged Scottish Cycling’s National Lottery fund to invest a further £300k, adding to existing community funding efforts. Fast-forward a year and those shoots have grown into one almighty forest of trees, in the shape of the Tarland 2 Trails that now boast 17km of singletrack.

Like so much in life, the devil is in the details: Tarland Trails really started in 2015; the brainchild of Chris Redmond, they brought a compact collection of trails to a small but community-focused town in the Scottish countryside. Eight years later, Chris spearheaded a sequel, an ambitious project to add a purpose-built trail centre to the map in Aberdeenshire, Tarland 2 Trails.

The plan had always been to build bigger then, but the storms really focused attention on making the trails more resilient to extreme weather, explains Will Clarke from North East Adventure Tourism, which helped bring many of the parties together for funding.