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Spotting the outdoorsy types while waiting to board the sleeper train to Scotland on a Friday night used to be easy. The golfers wore argyle sweaters and the stalkers and fly fishermen wore tweeds – but now there’s a new breed of adventurer leaving London for the wilds of Scotland.

Mountain bikers are less easy to spot if they haven’t got a bike in tow – but little clues like the wrap-around sunglasses or the mud-splattered rucksack give them away. They’re heading to Scotland in their thousands.

In fact Scotland has usurped Canada as the world’s best mountain biking destination according to the International Mountain Bike Association, and last year Scotland hosted the World Championships.

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• Photo gallery: mountain biking in Scotland

As beginners we’d been told to head to the Cairngorms National Park where there’s a good range of trails for all abilities. We got off the Caledonian Sleeper at Kingussie, a pinprick in the middle of Scotland. It’s a diminutive Highland town where seeing a man wander into a pub in a kilt doesn’t mean it’s a national holiday.

The station was manned by a single uniformed controller in a wooden tower overlooking the level crossing. For the last 90 minutes of the train journey after Perth, roll up the window blind and it’s picture postcard Scotland rushing by: hulking olive green and brown hills, tranquil pools stained with peat and spongy moorland peppered with wild flowers.

Kingussie is overlooked by the imposing shell of the Ruthven Barracks, which housed British Government troops during the Jacobite uprising of the 18th century. It’s built on a natural glacial hump rising so steeply on four sides that you have to scramble up, and for that reason it provided the perfect defence. The River Spey meanders past, its name conjuring images of salmon, trout and whisky.

On a clear day you can see the barracks and the river from the Hermitage Guest House in Kingussie, where we dumped our bags and indulged in one of my favourite aspects of Scottish hospitality - an enormous breakfast. It was only a 15-minute drive, following the River Spey, to Laggan Wolftrax, a mountain biking centre on the western edge of the Cairngorms National Park.

The popularity of the sport means there’s now 23 mountain biking centres like Laggan in Scotland that offer natural trails and purpose-built tracks. They are graded for difficulty like ski slopes, from green to black.

You can turn up at a centre and hire bikes on the day if you’re travelling independently or book a break with one of Scotland’s many adventure travel companies, like Wilderness Scotland. Going with Wilderness Scotland meant we got advice on the great little B&B that was walking distance from the railway station and we didn’t need to hire a car because they gave us a lift to the mountain biking centre.

Wilderness Scotland offers a range of mountain biking breaks including an epic eight-day coast-to-coast trip, but for us they put together a mountain biking taster weekend that began when the sleeper deposited us at Kingussie at 7.18am after a fitful night’s sleep, and had us back at our desks at 9am on Monday, exhausted but exhilarated.

We warmed up on a steady ascent through a pine forest dusted in late spring snow to where the trails peeled off according to difficulty and to my alarm we followed the red route. The 15km trail of undulating gravel bumped us over rock features, streams and drops, dipping between ancient Scots Pine trees and soft heather.

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