• Dark Peak Mountain Biking – True Grit Trails
• Paul Evans and Jon Barton
• £14.95
• Vertebrate Graphics
• 00800 4321 3350

Mountain bike guidebooks aren’t generally great examples of contemporary design, but Dark Peak Mountain Biking is a little different. Publisher Vertebrate Graphics is a design agency as well as a producer of guidebooks (primarily for rock climbing – DPMB is its first MTB guide) and the book has a great, clear look.

Up front you’ve got the usual general advice about rights of way, safety, equipment and so forth and then its on to the routes themselves. They’re divided into length/toughness categories from Classics (short blasts) to Killer Loops (very long and difficult), plus a selection of point-to-points. They’re all graded too, and there’s a decent explanation of what the grades mean at the front of the book, complete with caveats about weather. You’re getting 26 routes altogether.

The route presentation consists of the usual description/map combination. Rather than Ordnance Survey extracts, DPMB relies on custom-illustrated maps. This has pros and cons. On the plus side, unnecessary or irrelevant detail can be left out for clarity, and it’s easy to annotate the maps with symbols indicating difficulty or obstacles without everything getting very cluttered. On the other hand, we rather miss the things that you don’t get, like contour lines and a grid.

The descriptions are very much landmark/junction based in the “Straight ahead through gate, right at junction, over river crossing” vein. You get occasional distances but they’re generally approximate, and the only grid references in sight are the ones for the start and end points of the routes. As huge map fans we’d prefer grid references for junctions and an indication of which direction you’re meant to be heading, potentially vital if the weather goes a bit off. It’d also make it easier to transfer the routes on to an OS map or into a GPS. To be fair, though, most of the Peak trails are sufficiently well-used to be pretty obvious. Each description kicks off with useful information like start point, distance, height gain, parking, and any cafés or pubs en route.

The routes themselves include a bunch of old favourites that’ll be familiar to Peak fans, plus a number from slightly less obvious areas. The book also features “top tens” for singletrack, descents and climbs, useful if you’re aiming to put together your own route. There’s also lots of photographs that manage to convey the impression that it’s always late Spring in Derbyshire and a smattering of handy tips throughout the book. Finally, a useful appendix gives details of shops, accommodation and eateries.

Handily, PDFs of the maps and descriptions are available on a CD so you can just print the essentials off rather than carrying the whole book around and probably wrecking it in the process.

Positives: Good route selection, clear design, complementary CD, nice photos

Negatives: We’d prefer grid references, directions and distances rather than just landmarks and junctions

Saying this is one of the best-produced guide books out there could come across as damning with faint praise, but DPMB is a very high-quality volume and certainly far and away the best Peak guide we’ve come across. Vertebrate is working on further titles covering the Yorkshire Dales, Wales and the South West. Going by the standard of DPMB, they’ll be well worth waiting for.

Performance: 4/5
Value: 4/5
Overall: 4/5