Biking the Moray Monster Trails

14/10/2024

After a lot of walking it was time to indulge Paul with some Mountain Biking. Winding Walks is a Scottish Forestry location which hosts the ‘Moray Monster’ trails and offers overnight parking via their “Stay The Night” scheme. It was perfect. In fact it was so good that we came back again a few days later, so we’ll cover both days in this blog entry. More about the time in between in the next blog.

Motorhome Parking at Winding Walks

We turned up at Winding Walks in the morning. It’s a sloping parking area made up of a number of small parking spaces between trees and surrounding a central grassy space with benches and a notice board.

We drove around a couple of times to try to find a flattish space, but the parking was quite busy so we decided to find any space and then move later that evening. The spot we parked on was a fair slope and we decided to put a chock under our back wheels just in case. £2 was the price for daytime parking so we paid this and the overnight parking fee. Different forestry parking areas have different daytime parking costs, but the overnight parking is always £7.

Getting ready to go out on the bikes at Winding Walks

Later that evening we moved up to the back of the parking area where we could get onto a flatter spot facing into the forest. We thought we might spot some wildlife, and even put out some peanuts. They were all eaten by the morning but it was too dark to see the culprit.

Moray Monster Trails

Moray Monster trails are spread across two locations in the forest. We started with the red trail ‘The Fochabers Ring’ purely because it starts from the Winding Walks parking spot. It was a bit muddy in places with some slippery roots which made some of the downhills interesting. We did it twice because we missed a turn on the first time round.

As usual Paul sped off gung-ho whereas I was more tentative, but this was at the easier end of the red spectrum very good fun but not too technical or challenging. Only the sideways slips on the roots caused me the occasional adrenaline rush. I just had to keep telling myself that the bike can manage, just focus on steering and pedaling.

Getting muddy on the Moray Monster trails

On the way uphill we found a couple of interesting landmarks.

After the red trail we went around the skills trails a few times. These are also located next to the Winding Walks car park and were our favourite part of the whole area. Short skills trails of different difficulty levels. The Red skills trail was significantly harder than the Fochabers Ring and even Paul found it a little spicy with it’s challenging rock gardens. For me, the Blue trail was nice and flowy and the orange (jumps) trail was a roll-able joy ride, you’d have to really attack the table tops to get any air.

Moray Monster Trails – the other side

On our second visit we went to the other side of the forest. There are a couple of ways to get to the trails on that side. We cycled out of the Winding Walks car park and straight across the road, from there footpaths are signposted into Fochabers (but dont worry, this is a mixed use path with plenty of room for bikes), this goes under the A96 into town where you can cycle down to the Ordiquish parking spot (not really big enough for a van of our size) and access the blue trails.

The other way involves an underpass near Fochaber’s campsite which joins the red run. We only found it on the way back and decided it would definitely have been more straightforward to cycle back the way we’d arrived.

The blue trails on the Ordiquish side of the hill were nice flowing trails which were worth the trudge uphill on forest track. You can join them all together into a nice approx 20km ride. This just adds a little uphill between each trail in the order The Haggis – Gordzilla – The Dragons Tail – The Soup Dragon. We whizzed down these, throwing up a lot of spray from the soggy ground so that our backs and bums were brown with mud.

Visiting Fochabers

After finishing the blue trails and getting the mud off with a hit shower we still had most of the afternoon left to enjoy. We walked back into Fochabers for a look around. Christies is a name you cant help seeing in the town, the large garden centre, gift shop, cafe and kids play area is advertised on the way into Fochabers, and sign-written vehicles can be seen driving around. We went into the Teapots cafe, so called because of a large collection of teapots on the walls. They must take some dusting. Tea (or Hot Chocolate for Paul) and cake was a welcome treat after our cycling that morning and a walk around town and along part of the Spey was a good way of stretching our legs.