"Outdoor events popular for decades in the Pentland Hills have been cancelled this year due to new restrictions and price demands from a secretive land manager’s group and the Ministry of Defence."

A very good article on this land access issue:
theferret.scot

Interestingly, there may be room for running smaller events without the landowners permission; the official guidance for outdoor events, "The Scottish Outdoor Access Code is the key reference source for event organisers." says that land owners/managers require to be notified only if any of the following is true:

I rode the amazing Italy Divide "Not a race". Crossing Italy from Pompei, via Vesuvious, Naples, Rome, Siena, Florence, Bologna, Verona and the prealps, to Tolbole on Lago Garda. Met some great people, ate amazing food, rode through beautiful scenery.

There are also a fantastic series of day-by-day videos from Ewald Stadtlher, who I rode the first half with:
YouTube- AnaBanana
Lots of nice drone footage!

This is the first day, click the link above for the other days:

"The Three Peaks Bike Race is a bikepacking race from Vienna to Niece. The cyclists ride entirely self-supported and have to pass three set checkpoints. On average it takes them 9-10 days to reach the finish line. There is no prize money involved."

"Stephen Pern drops the latch on his South Coast home and heads for the open hills, or rather for open hill shelters, the hundred or so bothies which are scattered across upland Britain. His mission is to supply each shelter with hanging points for wet clothes and gear, his supply of hooks and screws gradually diminishing over the course of his 3000 mile walk. Funny, perceptive and absolutely genuine, HOOKS might just persuade you that Britain is a great place to live."

With loads of folk making the move from Twitter to Mastodon, a similar-ish service which is free and open source, there is lots of talk of the fediverse; a set of federated services built by developers, and running on thousands of volunteer run servers.

Here's a list of some of the best fediverse services:

Diaspora The original Fediverse distributed social network.

Friendica lets anyone or any organisation literally create their own private "facebook" on the fediverse and make it accessible and federated with the rest of the World.

Hubzilla Friendica improved

Peertube Youtube competitor

JHOOM, go with the flow from Bike2reality on Vimeo.

An interesting fact about the first video shown is that Hans Zimmer makes a cameo as the keyboard player.