Coed y Brenin must become a community run trail centre with a new “vision for the future”, or accept trail closures and a slide to irrelevance. That’s the view of Toby Bragg from Beics Brenin bike shop at Coed-y-Brenin, who fears NRW’s decision to close the visitor centre is just the start of plans to withdraw from the entire site.

“Where trails have to be closed for felling or because they’re damaged… they just won’t be reopened again” – Toby Bragg, Beics Brenin

Earlier this week NRW announced Coed y Brenin’s iconic visitor’s centre will be closing its doors, following a year of confusion and speculation, with a danger the surrounding trails could be next on the hit list. Toby – who also sits on the board for Caru Coed y Brenin, the community group formed to help protect the trail centre – told us passing the baton over from NRW to the community would actually be a positive.

Coed y Brenin’s visitor’s centre will close as we know it: long term, NRW plans to lease out the venue to commercial contractors

“I fear that with no staff on-site, NRW will retreat from the place,” Toby says. “Where trails have to be closed for felling, or because they’re damaged… they just won’t be reopened again. We need people to get angry about this and understand that, yes, this really could happen.”

NRW’s preferred solution is to hand the entire site and its trails over to commercial ownership, according to Toby, and with no input from the local community of riders, there’s no guarantee the trails will remain open.

Coed y Brenin still hosts the mbr trail.

“The community can put together a bid for this though,” he says. “If you have a strong enough vision for the future and you don’t have to satisfy shareholders, then there’s no reason the site can’t be made to work. We’ve got enough riders coming here to make it work, the place is really busy with 150,000 visitors a year, and we’re at pre-pandemic levels of busy.

NRW hopes to save £12 million by 2025/2026, with the belt-tightening coming from 233 job cuts, which includes 113 unoccupied posts and 120 current roles. Those impacted will apparently be redeployed within the organisation where possible.

Toby Bragg says there’s no reason to think Coed y Brenin was losing money though, with the funding structure obfuscating the true costs. Money raised from the cafe and parking goes directly to NRW, with the costs being drawn from a different pot, he explains.

“NRW took the decision to move all the visitors centres from its recreation department to commercial, so whatever wasn’t operating cost was a commercial loss.” he says. In other words, NRW was looking at the outgoings without taking into account what was coming in.

Back in 2015 we scoped out the original Coed y Brenin trail, Tarw Du, to see how it had changed over two decades

Coed y Brenin’s history

Coed y Brenin was conceived and built in the 90s with a grand vision in mind, to draw much-needed investment into an area of the country that needed it badly. It succeeded beyond most people’s expectations, with the few thousand riders expected growing in the hundreds of thousands. It spawned a generation of trail centres from the 7Stanes in Scotland to Cwmcarn and Afan in South Wales.

Thirty years on though, the trail centre is all but dead in England and Wales. While public money was available for building trail centres like Coed y Brenin, it’s been much harder to secure it for maintenance.

“It’s the erosion of the trail centre model. The visitor centre is the first step, dumb that down, close the doors and I fear it’ll never open again,” Toby says. “After that it’s much harder to reopen them, easier for NRW to walk away, and less of a draw for riders who want somewhere warm to sit after their ride.”

Beics Brenin is the on-site bike shop at Coed y Brenin and is remaining open.

Can Coed y Brenin be saved?

NRW has three public meetings planned around each of the three trail centres involved – Bwlch Nant yr Arian, Ynyslas, and Coed y Brenin – which will hopefully shed more light on the public body’s plans. Before those take place, Caru Coed y Brenin has a meeting with Elsie Grace and Madeleine Palmer of NRW.

The meetings are taking place at: Borth Community Hall, High Street, Borth, SY24 5LH, on November 25 starting at 7pm for Ynyslas); Neuadd Penllwyn Capel Bangor, Aberystwyth, SY23 3LS, on November 26 starting at 6.30 pm for Bwlch Nant yr Arian; and Ganllwyd Village Hall, Llanfar, Y Lli, Ganllwyd, LL40 2TF, on November 27 starting at 6.30pm for Coed y Brenin.

By the end of November we should know a lot more about what’s happening to the UK’s original trail centre. Toby Bragg is remaining optimistic though:

“Handing over responsibility might be a really good step”, he says. “A continuity offer for the cafe, and passing the entire site on, might be the best thing and a new opportunity. If not, once they close the doors the damage is already done.”