Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present

Before I became a chronicler of the men detained without charge or trial in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I wrote a book about the British counter-culture, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, which told the story of Britain’s most iconic ancient monument from the point of view of those who have sought to make it their own in the face of opposition from the government and the archaeological establishment: festival-goers, travellers, anarchists, eco-activists, Druids and other pagans.

I also compiled, edited and contributed chapters to The Battle of the Beanfield, produced to commemorate the 20th anniversary of that brutal day in June 1985, when, having destroyed Britain’s mining communities, Margaret Thatcher turned her jack-booted attention to another “enemy within”: the travellers and political activists who had replicated the Greenham Women’s anti-nuclear protest at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, and who were viciously set upon by police from six counties — and the Ministry of Defence — as they tried to make their way to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual free festival, an anarchic free-for-all, the likes of which are now but a distant memory.

As thousands gather at Stonehenge for this year’s solstice gathering, I thought this might be a good occasion to commemorate the long struggle for access to Stonehenge by offering The Battle of the Beanfield at a specially reduced price of £9.95 (normal price £12.95). Click on the link above for details.

And as a reminder of what all the fuss was about — and how despicable it was of successive governments, from Margaret Thatcher to John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to use political protest and the demand for alternative lifestyles as an excuse to savage our civil liberties — I present below a gallery of Stonehenge solstices past and present, as featured in the books.

Revellers at the solstice in 1956. © The estate of Austin Underwood.

Druids at the solstice in 1960. © Gerald Ponting.

A ceremony at the first Stonehenge Free Festival, 1974. © The estate of Austin Underwood.

A bucolic moment at the 1978 festival. © Roger Hutchinson.

An aerial photo of the last Stonehenge Free Festival, 1984.

Police brutality at the Battle of the Beanfield, June 1, 1985. © Tim Malyon.

A banner commemorating another police assault on the crowd excluded from Stonehenge at the 1988 solstice. © Jo Bradley. The solstice exclusion zone remained in place until 2000.

Defiance during an occupation of Stonehenge at the spring equinox in 1989. © Alan Lodge.

An occupation on May 8, 1995, the 50th anniversary of V.E. Day, organized primarily by supporters of the massive anti-road protest movement of the mid-1990s. © Adrian Arbib.

The summer solstice in 2003.

For an update from 2009, see: It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.