Big Wight - Isle of Wight MTB Festival

The Island

Team Trail Break have spent the last 16 years riding and running events in the best mountain biking places you'll find in Britain and abroad, so what keeps bringing us back to this unassuming little Island?

Quite simply, the Isle of Wight is one of the best kept secrets in UK mountain biking. At just 13miles from southern to northern tip and 23 miles east to west, the amount of great trails on offer is just staggering. The Island boasts over 250 miles of legally ridable trails and takes great care to signpost and maintain them. The southern and eastern downs of the Island are the best playgrounds, a relentless series of muscular hills criss-crossed with an enviable variety of trails; rooty woodland singletrack, scorching descents, gasping climbs and skyline ridge rides.

View from Stenbury Down

Forget your preconceptions about the Isle of Wight - these hills are big. To give you a bit of a comparison, the two kilometres of descending from the top of Shanklin Down drops you 195 metres, which is more than the legendary descent from Hollins Cross to Edale (170 metres) in the Peak District. the highest point on the island (St Catherine's Down, 236 metres) is just three short kilometres ride from the St Catherine's light house at sea level. Hills like this run the length of the Island. There is plenty of good low level riding too (with plenty of good pub and cafe stops for the ,ahem, 'serious athlete'), which our easier Festival event options make good use of, but the odd hill will still feature on your ride. there's just no getting away from them.

The climbs are always worth it though. The views from almost anywhere high up on the Isle of Wight are amazing. Patchworks of fields, farms and villages running down to the sea, and to the north, the mainland cut off by the Solent, just to remind you that you have gone away.

The atmosphere and pace feel just feel a bit different on the Island. Maybe it's just because you have to cross water to get there, but those few miles of water make a huge difference. The Isle of Wight is it's own unique place and as good a place to go with a bike as any. Which is why we've been running the Wight Diamond Festival there for the past 10 years. And why we'd still go riding there even if we hadn't.

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