A NEW not-for-profit festival in the Lake District is aiming to inspire more people to head out on cycling 'micro-adventures'.

The Adventure Cycling Festival, set to take place at Ambleside in June, will offer three packed days of workshops, lectures and film screenings.

Nils Amelinckx, who works for Tebay-based Lyon Equipment and is helping to organise the festival, said that there was a lot of 'momentum' happening within adventure cycling.

"People grabbing their bikes, putting some luggage on there and just going for a bit of a micro-adventure," he said. "We figured the best way to showcase our equipment but also to inspire more people to go and have adventures was to create our own festival which we could use as a forum to do just that."

The festival has been organised in association with the Brathay Trust, near Ambleside, a charity which aims to inspire children and young people to make positive changes that last a lifetime.

The event village at Brathay Hall will provide a hub from where organised activities will launch including a a 100km ‘gravel challenge event’, a guided overnight bike packing trip across the Lake District and self-guided trips.

The event is being run on a not-for-profit basis, with any surplus funds re-invested into subsequent festivals, or donated to charity.

Well-known cyclist Mark Beaumont is one of the headline speakers of the event and will talk about his plans to go around the world in 80 days on his bike and Sedbergh's Joss Livesey, who cycled around Europe attempting to reach the highest point within each border, will also be in attendance.

"It's sort of the who's who of adventure cycling, all the key people within that community are coming together," he said. "What Mark Beaumont is doing is phenomenal, it's really pushing boundaries.

"Even if people can scale that back and take one hundredth or a thousandth of what he's doing and go and ride into the Lakes from here, using their bikes as a bit of an adventure vehicle, that's what we're trying to achieve."

The festival will take place from June 2-4 and more information can be found at http://adventurecyclefestival.co.uk/