• Bike-Fax: North-East Wales
• Sue Savege and Tony Griffiths
• Book £16.95; CD £14.95
• Bike-Fax
• 00800 4321 3350

This is the second guidebook from Bike-Fax, following on from its Snowdonia guide. This one covers the less well-known area of North-East Wales, with 24 routes across the Clwydian Hills, Berwyn Mountains, Mynydd Hiraethog, Coed Llandegla and Llyn Vyrnwy. As with the Snowdonia guide, the routes are mostly traditional public right-of-way offerings, plus the recently-opened purpose-built trails at Llandegla. Anyone who’s ridden one of the enduro events that have taken place hereabouts will know that there’s a lot of largely unexplored potential in this bit of Wales, and this book’ll help you find it.

As per the first guide, the routes are split in geographical sections with a handy overview map on the contents page. There’s also the welcome addition of a listing by grade at the back if you’re looking for a particular style or difficulty of ride rather than one in a particular area. We’d still quite like to see an indication of the grades on the main contents page, though.

The route descriptions themselves are largely unchanged except for a couple of important refinements. Like the Snowdonia book, the NE Wales guide has English and Welsh text, but unlike the Snowdonia one the two languages are colour-coded so it’s easier to stick to the right language. The route introductions still alternate English and Welsh paragraphs, but we can live with that.

The other key change is that the route maps are now a lot less cluttered. They’re still illustrations but there’re far fewer icons on them now. We described some of the Snowdonia routes as looking like someone had spilt a packet of M&Ms on them, but there’s a lot less visual noise on these. Indeed, Bike-Fax saw fit to include an actual packet of M&Ms with our review copy to make up for the ones that weren’t printed in the book…

There’s also a companion CD available, offering the same routes in easily-navigable PDF format. Usefully for nav tech geeks, the CD also has GPS tracks that you can upload to any GPS receiver and Tracklogs files to use in the popular mapping software – very handy indeed.

Positives: All the good stuff from the first book but easier to read, useful CD content, covers what’s probably a completely new area for many

Negatives: Not much

Verdict

You can’t accuse Bike-Fax of not responding to criticism – pretty much everything that slightly spoilt the Snowdonia guide has been sorted for the NE Wales one, and the extra data on the CD is very useful. It’s also good to see a guidebook for somewhere a bit different. We look forward to Bike-Fax’s future offerings…