I can’t quite make my mind up about mountainboarding. On the one hand, it’s so hip, you can’t switch on MTV these days without having to watch hooded teens with names such as Boneman or Flipflop doing 900-degree air flips between Razorlight videos; on the other, it’s so embarrassingly square: I saw a midlife-crisis dad doing it down Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath, last weekend, and let’s just say he wasn’t mobbed by groupies once he’d wobbled to the bottom. Rad? Sad? It’s hard to tell the difference.

If you’ve kept your finger on the adrenaline- junkie pulse, however, you will know that mountainboarding is undeniably the new kid on the extreme-sports block.

What’s more, nobody loves it more than us Brits. Fabulously Heath Robinson — take one snowboard, stick miniature mountain-bike wheels at either end, find yourself a nice grassy slope and head downhill until your tongue tastes the turf — it couldn’t be more have-a-go British if they banned helmets and tied you to your board with string.

It may have been invented in California, but with more than 30 schools from Hereford to the Hebrides, Britain is now mountainboarding’s spiritual home. Hell, we’ve even got the world champion, a teenager from Calstock, in Cornwall, who recently raced — and beat — a Mitsubishi Evo on Top Gear, scudding with impressively suicidal abandon downhill across a field in the Brecon Beacons.

THE BIG QUESTION: does mountainboarding actually live up to the hype? I want to say “yes”, but I’m going to have to go for a hesitant “probably” instead. The problem, as with pretty much any adventure sport, is that before you can get to 900-degree Air Flips, Tail Pokes and Tuna Grabs, you have to endure an awful lot of Falling Over and Feeling Quite Knackered first. What’s more, a mountainboard weighs close on 15lb: that may not sound much as you sit reading this over your cornflakes, but lug one uphill more than half a dozen times and, believe me, you soon start getting wistful visions of warm baths and fireside pints.

On the plus side, mountainboarding’s basics are astonishingly easy to pick up. It’ll help, of course, if you’ve snowboarded, but even with only three desultory days of snowboarding under my salopettes, I’m soon pulling 180-degree flips and yeeha-ing like a teenager on alcopops, all just 40 minutes into my first lesson. Turns? Pulled them off on the very first go. Sliding stops? Took me only two attempts.

“Want to try something more interesting?” asked Roddy, my instructor, and in one simple, confident “yes”, I stumbled across the one key element to mountainboarding bliss: choose wisely when it comes to location. Unfortunately, I don’t think I had.

My only choice, living in Scotland, was Arran (actually, you can also learn on a dry ski slope in Dunfermline, but obviously you’ve got to plump for the full mountain thrill). Lovely place, Arran — stunning mountains, beautiful views — but crummy mountainboarding slopes, especially for beginners. They are talking about building a dedicated track through the forest below Goatfell this winter, but for now your reward for mastering the basics on a benign, grassy slope above Brodick is a death-by-gravel-and-bramble essay of the Forestry Commission tracks a few miles south of town.

Roddy’s a great teacher — and, yes, Arran is a beautiful island — but, four days on, I’m still picking the granite out of my grazes.

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WHAT SHOULD you be looking for instead? A dedicated mountainboarding centre is what you should aim for — as opposed to an adventure-sports centre that just happens to offer mountainboarding, but doesn’t have the slopes to make it worth your while. Or, more accurately, worth the skin damage. What you’ll get from a dedicated mountainboard centre is a grassy beginners’ slope and a “boardercross” track made from dirt — something to graduate to, as it won’t tear half the skin from your buttocks every time you get your brake stop slightly wrong.

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