Conflict
The festival attendees were viewed as "hippies" by the wider British public (some were, in fact, self-described hippies). This, along with the open drug use and sale, contributed to the increase in restrictions on access to Stonehenge, and fences were erected around the stones in 1977. The same year, police resurrected a moribund law against driving over grassland in order to levy fines against festival goers in motorised transport. However as late as 1984 the police-festival relations were relaxed: just a nominal presence (two police constables) in the car park. On solstice morning people sat on the stones and offered their spliffs to the police below, who politely declined. The right of the Stonehenge festival to occur had been historically contested, and that trend was dramatically resumed in 1985 when English courts banned the Free Festival from being held at Stonehenge. The ruling came so late that some Free Festivallers did not know about it, and several hundred attempted to show up in defiance of the ruling.
Read more about this topic: Stonehenge Free Festival
Famous quotes containing the word conflict:
“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty helps us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Journey to Gethsemane, go and feel the tempter’s power;
Your Redeemer’s conflict see, watch the anguish of this hour;
Do not hide or turn away: learn from Jesus how to pray.”
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“It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
—Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921)