Conlig MTB Skills Area

Conlig MTB Trail Skills Area

Clark & Kent Contractors were selected to design and build a new section of the mountain bike course at Conlig.
The facility will be primarily a 'Go Mountain Bike' MTB Instructors coaching area (CyclingScotland – Mountain Biking Proficiency Award). It will not be a public skills area.

The detailed brief we followed was as follows:

The facility should be capable of coaching a new rider through all of the Go Mountain Bike skills levels 1 & 2, along with basic riding and core skills. Core skills include balance, safe, effective braking, gears, body position, weight shift, cornering, bunny hops, pumping, track stands, manuals, front- and rear-wheel lifts, energy management, etc.

The skills area incorporates a mix of technical trail features similar to those found on cross-country MTB trails: rollers, small jumps, berms, rock sections, flat and banked corners, skinnies, drops and boardwalk-style elements, with options to roll all features so progression is safe and incremental.

Features are arranged to allow repeated laps and sessioning, so riders can work on individual skills like pumping, braking, cornering and weight shift without needing a long loop of natural trail. The progression is intended to take a novice rider from “first off-road ride” competence towards being comfortable on typical green/blue-graded UK trail-centre terrain, and to introduce the fundamentals needed before riding more technical red-level features.

The facility is primarily aimed at coached groups: youth programmes, school or community groups, and riders on formal skills courses who need a compact, safe environment to build technique before heading onto full-length MTB trails. More experienced riders can still benefit from sessioning individual features for technique refinement, but the design emphasis is on learning, consistency and risk management rather than big-air freeride lines