Most outdoor sports enthusiasts whizz straight through southern Scotland on their way to the Highlands - but for mountain bikers Dumfries and Galloway and the Borders have become one of the hottest locations on the planet.

A series of Forestry Commission sites known as the 7stanes have been established across southern Scotland, offering more than 400km of waymarked routes exclusively for bikers and catering to everyone from absolute beginners to the most hardcore of riders.

The project has been bankrolled by a combination of Scottish organisations and the EU - attracting around 500,000 visitors to the forests each year.

For our biking break, we aimed to combine a selection of the stanes into a week-long holiday, spending four nights near Dumfries and two at Peebles.

Related: Mountain biking glossary
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