Written By Richard Moore and Andy McCandlish
pb Pocket Mountains Ltd
www.pocketmountains.com

At last, someone’s written a full-on, dedicated mtb guide to the most mountainous corner of these isles; and with the pedigree of the two authors, you know these are going to be routes worth going out and doing as soon as possible. It’s a traditional-style guidebook with one picture per route, some basic distance/time information, a detailed route description, and a small and very basic illustrated map. The latter didn’t put us off at all, as there’s no way we’d venture into the Highlands without carrying a proper map as well anyway.
It covers 40 routes in total — a mixture of waymarked and natural trails — scattered across the Southern Uplands, including some of the 7Stanes centres, central Scotland, north-east Scotland and the Highlands and Islands, with some real classics on Harris and Skye.
We’d like a bit more information on the actual nature of the routes, particularly the epic natural stuff, where an idea of how much ascent is involved would be useful; and obviously anyone that wants to input GPS coordinates first will need to trace the route outline onto an OS map before starting out.
But at £6.99 for a selection of the very best trails in the UK, we wouldn’t care if we had to stay up all night drawing the maps.

MBR RATING: 9/10