The Big, Little Festival of Bikes - TweedLove Festival

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The Big, Little Festival of Bikes

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"Excuse me." For us Brits those two words can be the precursor to anything. From a little old lady passing you in the street, to a beating or a marriage proposal, they're pretty universal. When they're coming from a guy wearing high-visibility trousers, the chances are that person works for the local council and you're about to have an argument. I was bang to rights too, despite the clear "no cycling" sign on the bridge over the river I was lazily freewheeling down towards the far bank. I braked, braced and look the guy in the eyes. He was smiling. This I wasn't prepared for. "What do you think?" I was still trying to find the connections in my brain to form an answer, staring blankly back at him trying to work out what the hell was going on, what did he mean?


"What do you think of the festival?" That's when the penny dropped, there was no argument coming. The huge grin on his face should have given it away, but a lifetime of similar encounters leaves you hard-wired to put the defences up and admit nothing until they show you the video tapes later at the station... In my 30 or so years on the planet this conversation has never gone like this before, and may never again. The guy was beaming with pride, the world had come to his valley to come and enjoy the trails he calls home, and he couldn't contain himself, he was stopping strangers in the street to chat to them about how much fun they were having. "What do you think of the trails?" "Are you enjoying yourself?" "Have you been here before?" Then he leant in conspiratorially, as if to share some great secret: "You know we only hold these events as an excuse to build more trails for us to ride when you're all not here..."

"People are really proud of the scene here," explains festival founder, Neil Dalgleish. "[They are] proud of the trails, proud of the road biking and I think there's a real, genuine desire to share that." There are many things to be impressed by at the TweedLove Festival, the once yearly celebration of mountain biking in the Scottish Borders town of Peebles that lies along the valley from the Innerleithen and Glentress trail centres. The region itself is surely one of them. In a sport where we are often seen as interlopers, unwelcome guests in the forests and mountains, here in the Tweed Valley, and in Scotland as a whole, mountain biking is seen as a tourism staple bringing money into the kind of small communities that struggle to sustain employment for the people who live there. In fact, mountain biking at these two trails centres is the second largest tourist draw in all of Scotland, second only to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. Then there are the endless miles of trails, varying from family-friendly blue runs, through to slick, vertical chutes through pitch black pine forests.


Yet neither of these things are the most impressive thing about the TweedLove Festival. What will stay with me for years to come is the people, and the community those people formed. Everything in the Tweed Valley is there because people have chosen to put time in - the original trails were there well before the trail centres, and span far beyond their confines, the festival itself grew out of a social feeling among the people who dug and rode those trails. Roots of the festival lie in the old Hub Cafe (which is a separate story in itself, but one we're not going to touch upon here). Neil recalls, "There was this obvious sort of scene that was evolving, where people would go for a ride, they'd hang out and there was this sort of community feel... The very first year we did a film night, we had some ride-outs, and I remember overhearing someone saying in the bar after, 'this didn't just feel like we were going to an event, it felt like we're part of something'."

Now in its fifth year, the festival has gone from strength to strength. From local riders hanging out, it has developed exponentially. This year, the additional of the Enduro World Series to the festival is very much the icing on the cake. Neil is absolutely clear on how this has happened, "What has made it grow is the amazing commitment of the volunteers. It really is a remarkable community of bikers." Yet he as it grows he keeps a clear vision of what is important, "There's a really strong ethos of being really inclusive and having the whole community involved, we've got loads of kids' stuff. That's one of the things I'm most proud of to be involved with - that it is a for everybody thing."

While Neil talks, people come and go, rushing around to put the final preparations into for forthcoming EWS race. There are references to an incident that needed a helicopter the day before, Neil doesn't shy away from a potentially awkward question, he says that "It was a 62 year old woman. She rides a bike round here, it's just another person who rides a bike. She came off, she was ok - the reason she got helicoptered off was because it was really remote." It's then you realise how seriously they take the idea of this being a community festival and when we say "community", we mean the entire community, not just a narrow demographic of mid-teens, early-twenties energy drink-guzzling hardcore fans. From young to old, everyone comes out to take part, although there is a real focus on the young.


"I'm pretty sure James rode Berm Baby Berm before he was 3. Quite a lot of the kids are riding trails before they're 3." They start them young here, and it's not just Neil who's in on it. On the Wednesday night before the race the Peebles Cycling Club held a club night on the park where the local kids came down to ride with the EWS pros . Unlike most races they didn't want the sports top riders to come, race and leave, they encouraged them to come and spend time with the children - something that those children will undoubtedly remember for a long time to come.

The turnout was like nowhere else in mountain biking. Where else in the world do 100 kids turn out in the pouring rain on a Wednesday night to ride bikes? What makes that number more impressive is when you fully put it into context. Only half the kids that were supposed to attend showed up because of the weather. And this evening was only for one of the cycling clubs in Peebles. Each club is limited by how many pupils an instructor can take for a session, so to cater for the demand two more cycling clubs had to be created. In a town as small as Peebles that makes cycling a majority sport among the young.


When many people start looking at how they can develop mountain biking where they are, they tend to look to resort towns, like Whistler and the Portes du Soleil because they grab headlines. Peebles maybe isn't on the international list of mountain bike towns. And that's a shame, because this kind of model of mountain biking is far more important to the future of our sport than any eighteen year old hucking his meat through the world's best bike park. This is a case study in how good people can take somewhere decent and turn it into something exceptional. Because that's the truth of the Tweed Valley, beautiful as it may be, we doubt even the locals would argue that their geography and topography is particularly amazing. Rather, they have taken what they have and worked hard to create something unique and brilliant with what they have. It is truly is a perfect model of how mountain biking can build a community, take a positive role within the wider community and work to get children on bikes. And this festival is their annual chance to show the world just how proud they are of what they have here in the Tweed Valley.

www.tweedlove.com