At the moment we are concentrating on fixing up the trails as opposed to creating new ones. Our work therefore mainly involves repairing bad patches of the trails.

SAFETY INFORMATION - READ THIS FIRST

The last thing we want is for anybody to be injured when we are working. We would therefore appreciate it if you could take the time to read this:

Tools ** Coming Soon **

The main tools we are using at the moment are spades and mattocks.

The spades and shovels we have are ordinary ones and are used for digging in soft ground and shovelling rock.

A mattock is a bit like a pickaxe, with a large flat blade for digging on one side and a small sharp blade for chopping roots on the other. The chopping blade shouldn't be used to dig or it will get blunted very quickly. Mattocks are heavy duty tools and are useful for digging in rooty rocky ground. Swing from a foot or so and let the weight of the tool do the work. Eye protection should be worn when using them, particularly if the ground is stony.

A McLoed is a tool like a big flat tamper with a raking edge. These are used for clearing debris, raking loose material over the trail and packing down the surface.

We also use wheelbarrows for transporting materials. If the route to the work site is uneven it's a good idea to start with a fairly modest load.

For more information on trailbuilding tools and safety see American Trails

Repair techniques ** Coming Soon **

Low lying sections of the trails collect water which is quickly churned up into mud. In order to improve drainage we often dig sumps (Image 78kb). These are intended to accommodate the water that would otherwise collect on the trail. Pick the lowest side of the trail and dig a hole a foot or so back from the edge. The hole doesn't have to be enormous, but it should be lower than the bit of trail it is meant to drain, and big enough to hold the water that runs off. After you finish the hole dig a channel back to the trail. We generally make these 3-4" wide so cyclist's front wheels can't fall into them. Sometimes it's also worth putting a stick in front of the channel and/or sump so people realise it's there. Digging sumps serves two purposes:

•  to drain the trail/ holes - holes usually form in depressions, for the reasons stated above, and you often find fairly large sections of trail that drain into a limited number of points (even a flat trail will undulate to some degree). By digging a sump, even if the hole doesn't need armouring, water that lands on the trail before and after it can drain off, usually into more porous soil that the sump is dug into. In this way large sections of trail can be drained and weatherproofed without requiring extensive use of rock.

•  to direct the flow of the trail. When trails become muddy and then eroded, the trail widens and multiple lines appear. These also eventually get muddy and eroded, to the point where a piece of flowing singletrack has turned into a swamp. By using the positioning of sumps, and on which side of the trail they're dug, the trail can be restored to a winding piece of singletrack. After a year or two, vegetation will have regrown on the old sections that are no longer ridden and, apart from some mysterious humps and holes, it'll appear like it's always been that way. Also, by restricting the line and narrowing the trail back down to singletrack, the amount of work and material needed to fix it is dramatically reduced - picture the effort needed to fill 5 2m long trenches side by side, with that of filling one and that of filling a hole a metre wide with one 30cm wide!

Once the holes have been drained, they can be repaired by armouring them with rock.

If the hole is awkwardly shaped or the sides slope out gradually it can be a good idea to dig it out a bit first. Dig the sides out square so that the rocks you put in don't squidge out, but bear in mind that if you dig the hole out too wide or deep it will require a lot of rock to fill it.

Fill the hole with larger rocks to start with - these take up more space and increase drainage. Tamp these stones down using a tamper or simply jumping up and down on them. Then cover the larger rocks with a top dressing of smaller stone.

Don't use rocks that are bigger than 3-4" across or skimp on the top layer of stone. Larger rocks, and particularly ones that stick out of the repaired patch, will get kicked out by people riding over them, as has happened here (image 83kb). Conversely, don't cover the repair with too much gravel or it will be like riding through a sand trap. Stamp the finished repair down well, with a tamper, a McLoed or your foot!

Sumps and armouring can be used together to build up low-lying parts of the trail and keep them well-drained. The combination has been used to good effect in Matt's repairs to the climb up into 50 Acre Wood, often cited as the only bit of that particular trail that's rideable in all weathers. These are the most common repair techniques we are using at the moment but of course there are many more and we will be exploring these as our trailbuilding gets more ambitious.