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The summer solstice at Stonehenge is now celebrated by a grand company of policemen, trespassers, pot takers, coach drivers, pop bands, barking dogs and distraught farmers, none of whom, apparently, knows what is truly going on.

This year's first pop festival followers evidently broke into a National Trust field, half a mile from the stones, on Friday night. By yesterday there were well over a thousand, accommodated mostly in the now familiar tents, teepees and makeshift shelters, but occasionally in brand new polythene wigwams.

The spectacle is now a kind of ramshackle ritual. The coaches on the way to the official car park opposite the stones pause so that the passengers can gaze at the 'hippies.' Policemen move from control point to National Trust field. The fans say 'yeah man,' — it sounds as old-fashioned now as 'yes sirree' — and the wood smoke cuts the pure air of Salisbury Plain like the scent of burnt chips.

'There's a lot of power round here, man,' one follower volunteers, indicating leylines and ancient barrows. One group tries to harness some of it by sitting silently, eyes closed, to encourage the sun to shine. The old symbols of alchemy and the zodiac flutter on flags and tent flaps, but the sky stays heavy. A kind of rump parliament meets squatting on an ancient barrow, and decides against permitting a hot dog stand. It also passes a resolution against cutting down the farmers' trees for kindling. 'It's like cutting somebody off at the knees,' one voice proclaimed, transforming wilful damage into ecological immorality in a sentence.

Cyclostyled handouts are issued from time to time, from sources as mysterious as the stones. 'Don't take any drugs off the site,' one says. There is a threat that the Sex Pistols may come to perform, but no one knows when or why. The road outside is thick with the law, but what is to be done?

Beside the entrance to the field, a policeman notes the registration numbers of cars. A local milk roundsman who sold almost one thousand bottles before lunch says: 'They let the tradesmen in.' Union Jacks, a defiant innovation if ever there was one, fly high above the tents, among the soaring kites and the woodsmoke. There is much tramping about, sitting and strumming and waiting for the dawn.

'I mean, it's the way we live now, isn't it?' the milkman says. 'It's anarchy in action, man,' one of his customers says. Down the road the tourists from Europe and beyond retire to await the dawn between clean sheets.

Dennis Johnson

Pop bands and pot takers at Stonehenge,
G,
21.6.1977,
p. 36,
republished 21.6.2007;
http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/06/21/
pages/ber36.shtml

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