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:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
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