Welcome to the Monkeyspoon.com guide to mountain biking tracks & trails in Peaks District, in particular covering North Derbyshire and the Hope Valley. Whether you’re into Downhill or Cross Country there’s nothing quite like mountain biking in the Peak District with it’s beautiful scenery and challenging and techincal natural tracks. In the North of the Peak District is the Dark Peak which features gritstone and peat, gritstone providing good grip in the wet and dry, whereas the South, or White Peak, features limestone which is quite smooth and very slippery in the wet.

This is a list of what we consider to be the best legal downhill tracks and paths in the Hope Valley area, they are all either Bridleways or “Other Public Access Routes”, eg roads you wouldn’t drive your car on.

Currently there are no officially organised or purpose built public Downhill Courses in the Peak District, the nearest location for this is Wharncliffe, just north of Sheffield. The Forestry Commission has made the tracks built in the woods legal. Information can be found at www.wharncliffe.info and www.nohuman.co.uk.

Click on the links below to go to the page about that track:

Aston Near Hope
Bamford Clough Near Bamford
Brinks Road - aka The Roman Road, near Hope
Cave Dale - Near Castleton
Chapel Gate - Near Edale & Rushup Edge
Derwent Edge - Near Derwent, Ladybower & Fairholmes
Gores DH - Near Derwent & Fairholmes
HaggTor - aka Hagg Farm, near Ladybower, Snake Pass & Derwent
HopeX DH - aka The Beast of Hope Cross, near Ladybower, Snake Pass, Hope & Edale
Hurst Clough - Near Bamford & Hathersage
Jacob’s Ladder - Near Edale & Hayfield

More track pages will be created soon…

There is also a Google Earth map file showing the locations of mountain biking tracks in the Peak District in the Google Earth Tracks sub page.

Some statistics on legal riding in the Peak District
Bridleways account for only 12% of paths (footpaths & bridleways) in the Peak District, so for every 7.3 kilometres of footpath there is only 1 kilometre of bridleway.*
36%, 524 kilometres square, of the Peak District is open access land.**
^{(Statistics calculated from a 2008 Peak Park document: *2001 **2005)}

_{These pages are intended to be a guide to local tracks, and have been created to the best of our knowledge at the time of writing. You are responsible for yourself and so follow any advice given in these pages at your own risk. The map links we use are to Ordinance Survey’s free Get-a-map™ service, weather proof laminated OS map can be bought from Aqua3, which is a small local business, you can get a discount when you search through our link here.}