The sport of mountain biking extremely popular in the Peak District, especially around Edale and the Hope valley. Traversing the hillsides on a bike is an exhilarating (and often exhausting and dirty) experience and it is possible to cover considerable distances over unlikely looking terrain. You can find large groups of riders around these areas most weekends.
There main centeres for mountain biking are around the Hope Valley and the Upper Derwent valley, though good routes also start from Hayfield, Peak Forest, Eyam and Tideswell – just to give a few examples.
Bikes can unfortunatly cause a lot of erosion, especially on the peat areas, where the tyres cut deep ruts in the soft ground and rapid erosion follows. This has led to the Peak National Park Authority and the National Trust to ban mountain bikes from most footpaths, but this still leaves quite sufficient bridle paths in the area to give an excellent choice of routes. Please try to avoid taking bikes onto the high peat plateau areas – especially Kinder, Bleaklow, Brown Knoll and Derwent Edge.
In this section of our site we have detailed some of the best mountain bike trails The Peak District has to offer.