Scotland's 7stanes: Mabie

Our first day's riding on Scotland's 7stanes was at Mabie, located on a forested hillside just a few miles from Dumfries.

The centre has easy green and blue-graded loops for novices, but we tackled the red-graded Phoenix trail - a 17km loop with challenging downhill sections, flowing woodland singletrack, punishing climbs and a thrilling final descent.

The course starts (as do most trail centre routes) with a sustained climb, though singletrack and boardwalk sections take our minds off the pain a little.

Once we've gained some altitude, however, things start to get more interesting, with the "descender bender" section taking us up and over a hilltop and into a steep, twisty descent with banked corners - and with large rocks inexplicably placed beside the trail providing an added incentive not to come off.

This flows straight into the "Stan's pond" section, made-up of thrilling, tight, woodland singletrack, with a sea of bluebells flying past at eye-level.

The sting in the tail for all this fun is "the scorpion", a crushingly steep and unrelenting climb that sees all but the fittest riders getting off to push.

After getting our breath back on a short forest road section, the rest of the route is almost all singletrack.

The undulating woodland singletrack of "roller coaster" feeds into the gently climbing boardwalk sections on "elevator" - priming us for the fast, technical descent of "rattle and hum".

We arrive back at the café/bike shop for a late lunch and there's no Mabie about it - everyone agrees it was a seriously good ride.

Related: Mountain biking glossary | G&G Cycles
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