The Chilterns are blessed with lots of natural bridleway. This can get very muddy, and doesn’t have the underlying geology to support any technical trail. There’s some fun singletrack on the Icknield Way between Dunsmore (SP 8610500 and Princes Risborough (SP820144) but there’s a lot of dull trails too.
Aston Hill is one of the most popular destinations for London bikers. It consists of a cross country course, some downhills and a 4X course. The cross country has some great windy loops around the top of the hill, then joins the red downhill course to reach the bottom. Some of this course is quite full on and certainly took us by surprise on our first visit. They’ve attempted to make the return to the top interesting, but in reality it feels like a long drag, and personally, I find it hard to motivate myself uphill when I know I’ve already had the fun of going down. The course finished with some more windy sections at the top, although threes are almost always very muddy. The first top section returns almost to the car park before going downhill, so it’s easy to do loops of this without the full descent, although it always seems more knackering than I expect. We have also tried DH3, which actually apart from a couple of features is fairly similar to the red one. Beware of coming to Aston hill in the wet – the tree roots which form most of the technical features become very slippery and it’s just not fun any more. Also the berms on the 4X track take on the friction properties of Teflon – it really is quite unbelievable.
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