Once a low–key family cycle trail base or hang–out in between digs, things have changed over the past few years, ‘The Inclosure’ has developed into a destination. The wild boar have filled the gaps left by the rough old sheep, whilst the more feral trail builders have been replaced by the more domesticated and well dressed.

Bikes, road salt, cars, lorries and litter now arm wrestle for the scarce pieces of hard standing on the more sea level side of the hill, whilst the campers quietly go about their business up on the high but hardly dizzy plateau. It’s in and around this southern part of the inclosure area that has seen layer upon layer, wave upon wave, of locals cutting and scratching in their own power lines – there has been a forest pecking order around here for many, many years. The struggle, for riders at least, was/is always been about smashing in some unsubtle berms as inconspicuously as possible. A tall order, but Ski Run is an authentic part of that early groundwork that will outlive any surfacing theories, yet sadly many others have gone the way of the bramble or by the strong arm of forest law.

Life on the inclosure has evolved through the pushing and pulling of national politics, local squabbles. Whilst the true diggers have had over a decade of being pushed away in some form or other there has been eagerness to pull in the more dawdling Sunday spinners of the flatter surfaces. Starter tracks have recently had investment of five figure sums, you’ll see more stone to dust than freeminer black rock. And miraculously the more technical terrain – even though it sees little or no investment other than the muscle and sweat of dozens of willing hardcore volunteers – has suddenly become cool. The miners seem to look on with a wry snarl.

And once so sensitive to the moving of a branch or cutting of a berm the ubiquitous ranger now twitches with the rise and fall of the wheel clock counter on the Blue trail. 70,000 riders a year now plunder the narrow gauge, BMX style Verderer’s trail. From 9 riders per day this centre now brings in around 250 per day. Almost £400,000 of 1 South West money made the blue trail and new bridge possible. Berms are now not only a new word in the ranger’s vocabulary, but pound signs of the Forestry budgets. Simultaneously the eight wheel machines and men engaged in ‘real work’ (forest thinning) have not so much become the enemy to be run out of town but the slowers–down of the (desperately needed)  two wheel traffic. Tick tock. You cannot help but feel that ‘working forest’ has a different meaning in the inclosure these days. The miners look on…

On the surface of all this, literally, in terms of sustainability, the need for topping–up of the ‘sun tan smooth’, these starter tracks are held together by a constant cash drain (or was that storm drain) to prevent them from slowing up into gullies more difficult than the blue classification on which they base all their ‘models’. The tougher business is far simpler, as long as it’s steep, and left to the devices of the roots from which everything dodges, it maybe only be now that the forestry, in seeking to cater from blue to black, have realised big bikes to be lower in maintenance. So long as the Dean Trail Volunteers continue FOC in the FOD.