Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?
This is a bleak summer solstice as far as the weather goes, but no doubt for many of the thousands of revellers at Stonehenge last night (an estimated 18,000 people in total), it was, nevertheless, a memorable occasion, as it remains essentially unprecedented for tens of thousands of people to gather in a field at night, mingling amongst the stones of one of the world’s most famous prehistoric monuments, without some famous rock star or other strutting their stuff on a floodlit stage.
I haven’t been to the solstice for six years, having visited every year from 2001 to 2005 — after the wilderness years, from 1985 to 1999, when a military-style exclusion zone was declared, to keep out those who had not learned that they were unwelcome after the dreadful events of what is known as the Battle of the Beanfield — but every year I think about those converging on the ancient stones, and wait for the first reports and photos, to find out whether the sun shone at dawn, and to hear from those who were there.
My interest, as some of you will know, stems from the visits I made to the Stonehenge Free Festival, an annual riot of anarchy and alternative lifestyles that occupied the fields around Stonehenge for 11 years, from 1974 to 1984, until it was suppressed with unprecedented violence in 1985, when an advance convoy, heading to the stones to set up the festival, was ambushed by the massed forces of Margaret Thatcher’s militarized police, and decommissioned with savage violence at the Battle of the Beanfield. Read the rest of this entry »
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