There is nothing like bursting through one of your favourite trails to clear the cobwebs away. Some trails can be exhilarating, some can be challenging but most favourite trails provide a great feeling at the end, be it achievement or pure adrenaline. There are loads of great short bursting trails in and around robin hood country that I use to link rides.

One of my favourite trails is the trail into Thieves Wood just off the A60 near Mansfield. It’s a very flat, snaking trail which has a slight downhill to allow you to get some speed before the sharp right-hand bend at the end. It’s literally only a quarter of a mile long and feels quick and flowing.

Here’s one of my favourite videos, where I try and capture the trail in all its glory. 



Thieves Wood is a small wood I use to link other woods together to make a decent trail. It’s bordered by the A60, A611 and B6139 just to the south of West Notts College on the outskirts of Mansfield. It’s a great little wood for walking in, but has plenty of hard packed forest roads to bike on. Equally there are some smaller challenging routes linking the Forest roads, enough to pick and choose your way through the wood.

You can park in the car park on the A611 side and spend a morning linking the trails into a couple of decent loops to ride. I use the wood as a pass through to get to the bigger Harlow wood across the A60 which is a conduit to get onto Sherwood Pines, Pig Hill, Route 6 and back round to Newstead Abbey.  



This small route features in a number of articles on the website. Autumn is a fantastic time to visit Thieves Wood as the golden leaves cover the woodland floor like a blanket of snow. I tried to capture some of the colour in ‘Biking on a bed of golden leaves’. If you want to know which routes to do that include Thieves wood, take a look at the ‘Newstead Abbey Route’ which passes through Thieves wood towards the end of the route, or there’s the ‘Pig Hill Route’ specifically ‘section 2’ which explains the route through Thieves wood. To see Thieves wood in the summer, take a look at ‘Harlow in the Sun’ which features a couple of photos from Thieves wood.



Of course, you can take on the challenge of hitting the section hard and see how you fair against other rides who regularly do the trail. See Strava segment 'Entrance to Thieves Wood' to challenge the leaders.

To be a bit repetitive, as I say, there is nothing like bursting through one of your favourite trails. I have loads of favourite short and long trails I like to add into my routes. Do you? if you do let me know where and I’ll look them up.