38 Years Since the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, The Legacy of Those Who Destroyed It Is An Imminently Uninhabitable Planet

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Today, as revellers returned to Stonehenge, having been allowed to gather in the stones to watch the summer solstice sunrise for the first time in three years, because of Covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021, I find myself preoccupied with wondering what our ancestors, who built this sun temple on Salisbury Plain and so many other extraordinary monuments to the sun and the moon across the country, and throughout Europe and beyond, would make of the burning world we are currently inhabiting, in which extinction looms ever closer.

Our ancestors, of course, would have had no way of knowing that — thousands of years after they transported bluestones from Wales, and hauled vast sarsen stones from Avebury, 20 miles to the north, before shaping them over countless years and erecting them in horseshoes and circles aligned on the axis of the solar year (the summer solstice to the north east, and the winter solstice to the south west) — the sun they so evidently revered would be turned into a life-threatening monster by people whose self-regard, whose exploitation of nature and whose love of money would destroy the fragile atmosphere necessary for the life that — perhaps uniquely in the universe — teems everywhere on earth.

For all we know, our ancestors may also have ended up deranged by their own driving delusions, although it didn’t cause a mass extinction event. Certainly, something drove them to divert a startling amount of energy into building their temples and housing their dead — and their precious possessions. We can’t be sure of their motives, because they left no written records, but archaeologists have suggested that they were driven by fear; that Stonehenge, for example, was built not to mark the summer solstice, but the winter solstice, by people fearful that, after the steadily darkening months of autumn, the sun would not return, and spring would not bring its renewal of life, without all their effort.

In contrast, I grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s, at a time of mysticism, hedonism and anarchy, when Stonehenge was embraced by a wild coalition of dissenters and the dispossessed, who revered it as a place of celebration, focused on dawn on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. In these heady, iconoclastic times, all kinds of often fanciful notions were dreamt up about who the stone circle builders were, but while archeologists like the late Aubrey Burl, drawing on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, described their lives as “nasty, brutish and short”, who is to say that their closeness to nature didn’t mean that in many respects they were closer to their fellow creatures in the way they lived, and that comparisons with the modern day were therefore unfair? Would Burl also have concluded that all animals’ lives are also “nasty, brutish and short”?

The conflicting narratives around Stonehenge have been ongoing for longer than most people know. At the start of the 20th century, when archaeologists first began stabilising the stones, ossifying them in a frozen moment of half-ruined antiquity that largely reflected a late 18th century notion of what Classical ruins should look like, modern-day Druids also laid claim to Stonehenge, and were followed, in the 1950s and ‘60s in particular, by groups of revellers who saw the combination of the solstice dawn and Stonehenge’s ancient stones as a great excuse for a party.

The Stonehenge Free Festivals and the Battle of the Beanfield

In 1974, the next extraordinary phase in Stonehenge’s history began when Phil Russell, a young man who called himself Wally Hope, held the first Stonehenge Free Festival in fields by the stones, drawing on a dawning fusion of mysticism, playful anarchy and the establishment of free festivals that had that had already begun at Glastonbury, and in the occupations of Windsor Great Park for the Windsor Free Festival in August 1972 and 1973 (and which was violently suppressed on its third outing just two months later). Russell encouraged all those attending to call themselves Wallies — the Wallies of Wessex — and also encouraged them to stay for the summer, establishing a template of occupation that was built upon, after his untimely and suspicious death in 1975, by a growing community of festival-goers, pagans, travellers and anarchists who proceeded to hold a festival at Stonehenge every June.

By the 1980s, as the numbers of travellers taking to the road in re-purposed old coaches and commercial vehicles grew, to escape the mass unemployment in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and as political anger and environmental awareness grew, particularly aimed at the establishment of cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire and RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, the somewhat bucolic atmosphere of the festival’s early days gave way to the coming together, every June, of a gathering as big as a town, which continued to grow in size. I first visited in 1983, for what remains one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life, and returned in 1984, just two days after para-militarised police had violently attacked striking miners at the Orgreave Coking Plant in South Yorkshire, to discover that the festival had seemingly doubled in size, although, reflecting these darker times — in which Thatcher was rewriting George Orwell’s ‘1984’ as a contemporary vision of state control — it was a much edgier experience.

Afterwards, as Thatcher continued to crush the miners, she also turned her attention to the travellers, launching a savage assault on a convoy of vehicles at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire in July 1984, shutting down a peace camp at RAF Molesworth on February 5, 1985, which involved defence secretary Michael Heseltine leading the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in British history, and harrying the displaced travellers for months afterwards until, on June 1, 1985, as a convoy of vehicles attempted to make its way to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 13th free festival, they were attacked with unprecedented violence on the Wiltshire border, in a horribly one-sided assault that has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield, in which 1,400 police, from six counties and the MoD, physically attacked the travellers (who included women and children), destroyed their vehicles, arrested everyone, and took children into care.

For more on the Stonehenge Free Festival and the Battle of the Beanfield, see my books Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, both still in print.

The Beanfield spelled the end for the Stonehenge festival, and sent deep shockwaves of trauma through the survivors of this extraordinary assault by the government on its own people, although it was not the end of dissent — or, eventually, of gatherings at Stonehenge, although they were not what they had been in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Out of nowhere, a new free party movement, based on a new music, Acid House, and a new drug, ecstasy, revived the free festival movement, Thatcher’s hated Poll Tax brought the country out in open revolt, and would-be travellers, preventing from travelling, established a new movement, the road protest movement, whose campaigners sought to protect what was regarded as the sacred landscape of England from road expansion plans by rooting themselves to the earth, via tunnels, treehouses and “locking on” to heavy industrial equipment.

Eventually, the government responded by passing new legislation that severely curtailed the freedom of assembly that was causing them so much trouble, but at Stonehenge, where a military exclusion zone was declared every summer solstice, an unexpected victory came in 1999, when the Law Lords ruled that the exclusion zone was illegal. In response, English Heritage were obliged to open up Stonehenge every summer solstice for what they describe as ‘Managed Open Access’ to the stones for around 12 hours on the morning of the solstice and the night before.

I went every year from 2001 to 2005, and while it was inspiring to be in the stones for the solstice dawn, it could never be what it had been. Ironically, of course, in the days of the festival, only a small number of those attending went to the stones for the solstice dawn; now, after 15 pointless years of a paramilitary exclusion zone, the entire festival was in the stones. You’d have to have no sense of humour not to laugh at that. But sadly, what’s been lost is rather more than that. While I don’t doubt that some of those attending ‘Managed Open Access’ seek a deep connection with the land and with those who built Stonehenge, in other ways it seems to be little more than an open-air fancy dress party, in which make-believe has replaced feeling.

The urgent need to revive mass dissent

The crushing of the festival and the travellers’ movement was part of a wider effort to suppress dissent (in this case, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to protest), which, in conjunction with the assault on workers and unions via the Miners’ Strike, was part of the creation of a new Britain, in which property rights were violently reasserted, and which sought to crush all opposition to the unfettered expansion of private enterprise, and a state subservient to its requirements.

At the time of the Beanfield, Britain’s compliant, largely right-wing media echoed Thatcher’s vilification of the travellers as a menace, even though, as was explained by Nick Davies of the Observer, who travelled with the convoy on the day of the Beanfield, they were they were largely welcomed by those they encountered on the road, as they passed through towns and villages. As I see it, people responded to them more as travelling minstrels than as the dangerous parasites that the establishment so relentlessly seeks to portray nomadic people — and especially Gypsies — as, and that perception can still clearly be seen in the vile and punitive efforts by the current home secretary, Priti Patel, to criminalise the very way of life of Gypsies and travellers.

Moreover, despite other persistent efforts to portray the travellers and festival-goers as dirty squatters who left nothing but squalor in their wake, the free festivals, in general, were driven by an ethos of sustainability and of “leaving no trace” — green credentials, ahead of their time, that were largely abandoned as commercial festivals took over from the free festival movement in the 1990s, following the passage of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994. Look at Stonehenge this morning, and at the Glastonbury Festival site next week, and you’ll see that most people no longer have any idea what the concept of “leaving no trace” means. Everything is disposable, and somebody else can clean it up. Does it really honour the creators of Stonehenge to leave the temple as a rubbish tip, or, indeed, to treat the whole planet as a dustbin?

38 years on from the last Stonehenge festival, it is bewildering to think how we might explain to those who built Stonehenge what we have been doing to the fragile atmosphere of this extraordinary planet since the dawning of the Industrial Age, and particularly, extraordinarily, in the last few decades of completely unhinged over-exploitation and materialism.

And yet it seems certain to me, looking back to the ’70s and ‘80s, that those who, however fancifully, sought to understand the motivations of our ancestors — and who, in so many cases, sought to live closer to nature than settled society could either envisage or even remember — would have been at the forefront of efforts to challenge the complacent slide towards extinction that typifies our collective response right now to what is, without any doubt, an unprecedented threat posed to our very existence by catastrophic climate change, which we alone have unleashed, and which we are increasing every single day that we refuse to take action to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

The list of what we could and should be doing is immense: shutting down all new oil and gas extraction now and forever; stopping the demolition of buildings that can be re-purposed, and stopping the profit-driven rent and mortgage slavery of the environmentally ruinous construction industry; stopping our unthinking or self-satisfied purchase of products that are flown halfway around the world or transported on ships carrying, literally, tens of thousands of containers; driving less; flying less; banning cruise ships; insulating homes; consuming less; consuming less; consuming less.

The situation we’re in is a direct result of the victory of those who crushed the Stonehenge festival and the travellers’ movement, and what they represented, and it is that triumph that has led to the orgy of self-obsession that we see everywhere, and that we contribute to every time we ignore those long-lost lessons from before the triumph of neo-liberalism: leaving no trace, and living lightly on the earth.

Or, as we also used to say back in the days of the free festivals, “If not you, who? If not now, when?”

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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