Hi!
Are there any trails in Scotland?
I know that's all you want to know.
It's all I wanted to know on the day that I left on our week long adventure to the Outer Hebrides.
Firstly a super short bit of background for those not quite up to speed with the whole England/Scotland trail riding situation.
In England, there's a network of old unpaved roads that are legally classified as 'roads' which can be accessed by vehicles, including trail bikes.
If you are riding the TET over here in England and Wales, then that's what you are riding on.
In Scotland the same legal network does not exist, so the common understanding is that no, you can't go trail riding in Scotland.
Which considering the landscape, is a little heartbreaking.
When we set off on our Scotland adventure, I was fully prepared to ride my little 450EXC as far north as possible, endure a bit of motorway, and then fling it around the Highland twisties.
A mission to find the smallest little backroads that the big BMW GS's wouldn't dream of taking on their NC500 trip.
Maybe those little roads would be in such a poor state that they are on their way to becoming 'trails'.
If the end of a road was a dead end then that would be OK, we'd just turn around.
The only real way to find out was to go and see for myself.
Which is exactly what we did.
I probably only have another sixty seconds of your attention so I'm not going to spend it on telling you exactly where we went - you can find that out in the film that's coming later this summer.
Here's what I think you want to know.
The motorway bit sucked on my KTM 450, but it was short.
We found those twisties and they were sublime.
The further north we went the quieter it became.
The further north we went the less gates we saw at the start of dirt tracks.
The further north we went the less 'Private Property' signs we encountered.
Once we got onto the islands we found dead-end unpaved roads on the OS map that were accessed directly off the main paved road.
If there was a gate we stopped and didn't open it.
Where there was no gate we explored the unpaved road.
Sometimes it was 10 meters, sometimes it was 100m.
Sometimes there were camper vans at the end parked up next to a beach.
Sometimes we found ourselves on long flowing gravel.
One time we discovered that we were on a drivable causeway to an uninhabited island.
None of the sections of track we rode linked up, everything required us to turn around and come back out the way we went in, which made us grateful for having smaller, lighter, more manoeuvrable bikes.
Every track we discovered we approached with the mindset of being friendly and respecting any instruction given to us by the locals.
Every local we met greeted us with a smile.
Are there any trails in Scotland?
Well, define trail.
Further north there's a lot of small paved and unpaved roads that go to places I've never been, none of which were very long, but in some ways finding out what's at the end of those tracks has been more of an adventure than I've had in a very long time trail riding.
There was no little blue line to follow on my GPS.
And if you take that attitude, paved or unpaved road, there's lightweight motorcycle adventure to be found much closer to home than the northern tip of Scotland.
But you know, Scotland has views like this...
As soon as the film is finished I will let you know.
🏴🙏
Greg Villalobos
This story was first published in our email Newsletter. Subscribe now for the most ADV email you will get all week!