Continental: Up from the Slate

The Welsh countryside can be a vast untouched wildness of roaming forest and distant mountains, or it can be the complete opposite, a thriving and overcrowded environment filled with bustling businessmen and pencil pushers. Blaenau Ffestiniog once was one of the latter, a slate industry driven town where mining and quarrying were its biggest investments. Over the years the thriving industrial town has seen its self dry up of all it resources and slowly starting to decay. Don't get me wrong, business in the quarries is still booming and the slate that comes from this area is still some of the best in the world but the mine tours and corner shops selling sticks of rock don't bring the crowds like they used to.

In the interest of driving the tourism back into Blaenau, the locals turned to bikes, one local in particular, Adrian 'Bud' Bradley took it on him self to to open the darndest, most rootenest tootenest attraction for miles. Antur Stiniog was born and boy did the flocks of bikers come.

Antur gained the attention of the enduro team from Continental and couldn't help but feel it was a great place to capture the essence of what this place is, the views, the scenes, the copious amounts of slate and most of all the riding. Great trails and an all round joyful day had with the 2 of 3 from Team Continental. Rob Scullion and Mike Inman looking quick and on form for this year of gravity based enduros here in the UK, crazy how they manage to find time to train around their full time jobs.

Videography: Laurence Crossman-Emms // http://www.laurence-ce.com

More information on the trail centre and for booking your uplift: http://www.anturstiniog.com/

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