Andy Worthington _ The Pagan Reinvention of Stonehenge _ Avebury _ Audio Only _ Megalithomania 2006

The Pagan Reinvention of Stonehenge and Avebury, presented by Andy Worthington. In this lecture, Andy looks at the development of neo-paganism at these sites, a story that includes 100 years of druids, goddess worship, earth mysteries, free festival and road protest movements. Recorded live at Megalithomania Conference 2006. Hello everybody. I'm here to talk about the modern pagan history of two of the most celebrated ancient landscapes in the UK, Stonehenge and Avebury. The revival of pagan interest in Stonehenge and Avebury can, in many respects, be traced to three particular sources. Firstly, the druidic visions of the exceptional antiquarian and field worker William Stuteley, who discovered Stonehenge's solstice alignments and recorded much of the Avebury stone's destruction in the early 18th century. And who, by building on his predecessor John Albury's more sober ruminations on the druidic genesis of Britain's ancient monuments, established a template for ancient philosopher priests that has been with us ever since. Second source is those who concern themselves with lines upon the landscape which they imbued with astronomical or mystical significance, including the Reverend Edward Duke, a retired cleric who suggested in 1840 that the ancient sites of Wiltshire had been laid out by the druids as a giant planetarium, with Silbury Hill at the centre and Stonehenge as the outer ring representing Saturn. The physicist Sir Norman Lockyer, whose detailed and often accurate investigations of astronomical alignments were shamefully undermined by the archaeologists of the early 20th century. And Alfred Watkins, a Herefordshire merchant whose investigations of ancient lines across the countryside, which he referred to as ley lines, also infuriated the archaeological establishment, this time in the 1930s when OGS Crawford, the editor of Antiquity, was so opposed to Watkins' theories that he refused to accept a paid advertisement for one of his publications. A third source can be traced to the happy coincidence whereby in the 1940s and 50s in particular, inspired by influences as diverse as the poetry of John Keats and the thoughts of Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos and Crete, writers and philosophers including Carl Gustav Jung, Gertrude Levy and Robert Graves, and archaeologists including Jaquetta Hawkes, Richard Atkinson, Stuart Piggott and Glyn Daniel, began to express their belief that the people of the Neolithic had worshipped a great goddess. According to the varying interpretations, this deity may or may not have represented a matriarchal golden age, but she was certainly widely perceived in the thousands of tiny figurines that had been unearthed from the Middle East through to Europe, and more boldly in the ground plans of structures as diverse as the temples of Malta and the chambered long barrows of southern England. Our story begins in earnest just over 100 years ago in August 1905, when for the first time a group of modern-day Druids arrived at Stonehenge, 700 unabashed individuals dressed in long white robes wearing false beards and brandishing sickles. Although they had no explicit connection with paganism, being instead the continuation of a quasi-masonic elite Christian brotherhood invented by the carpenter and builder Henry Hurl in 1781, their appearance acted as the impetus for a more radical group, the Circle of Universal Bond, commonly known as the Ancient Druid Order, to begin a long association with Stonehenge, which continues to this day, on the summer solstice the following year. As with much of this early history, the dates are disputed. The Druid Order claims to have visited Stonehenge since at least 1810, but as it also claims to have been founded in 1245, and to have been allied with the diggers and the levelers after the English Civil War, it may be prudent to take these claims with a pinch of salt. What's clear, however, is that the Druid Order brought to Stonehenge a far more radical agenda than that provided by Henry Hurl's descendants, who functioned as a friendly society, devoted largely to charitable work and the mutual benefit of members. Their adoption of the summer solstice seems to have been inspired not only by William Stuteley, but also by the stonemason and scholar Edward Williams, more commonly known as Iola McGanwy, who conjured up a Welsh Druidic history at the end of the 18th century. Williams's first Gorseth, held on Primrose Hill at the autumn equinox in 1792, and conducted within a small stone circle made of stones that he had brought along in his pocket, was the first recognisable combination of three factors, a sacred place, a stone circle, and the quarters of the solar year, that are at the heart of the modern-day story of both Stonehenge and Avebury. The Druid Order's belief system also aspired to far more than Christianity and fancy dress. Immersed in the growth of occultism and spiritualism that was prevalent at the time, they were influenced in particular by the teachings of Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. And as they began to exert their influence at Stonehenge, their palette of influence expanded. Their most prominent leader, George MacGregor Read, who was the chief Druid from 1909 until his death in 1946, had travelled extensively in Afghanistan and India, where he had been initiated as a Buddhist. And one of his most popular sayings was that God is too big and too great for any church. Under his leadership, the Druid Order harangued those in charge of Stonehenge until the outbreak of the Second World War. Initially, this took place through confrontation with its private owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, who had had the temerity to raise a fence around the temple and charge an entrance fee in 1901. Objecting to the fee, the Druids were often to be found cursing the owner and being physically ejected from the temple. And when Antrobus died in 1915, they claimed that his demise had been the result of a particularly successful curse. After the First World War, they regularly aroused the wrath of the government, which had been given the monument for the benefit of the nation by its last private owner, Cecil Chubb, who had owned it briefly from 1915 to 1918. In 1919, when they sought access on the 21st and the 22nd of June, the custodian, Mr Smith, was obliged to enlist the aid of four policemen to restrain them. The following year, they retaliated by demanding four days access on and around the solstice, prompting a refusal from an exasperated official who declared, some limit must be set to this absurd and degrading nonsense. In 1926, when they had actually been banned from the solstice for trying to enter the ashes of one of their dead, an action which until then had apparently been a fairly regular occurrence, they actually stormed the gates, the fences, to gain entry. By the time the Second World War ended, however, the conflict between the authorities had come to an end, and throughout the 1950s, they conducted ceremonies every year, often accompanied by members of the general public who began attending in ever larger numbers. Arguably, however, the most important aspect of Druidry during this period was not the solstice ceremony at Stonehenge, but what was happening behind the scenes. 1946 was the first year that one particularly influential individual, Gerald Gardner, a retired colonial administrator with a lifelong interest in antiquarianism and the supernatural, was recorded as a member of the Druid Order. It was a fruitful period for Gardner. Over the next few years, he put together most of the background and materials required to launch a new religion, Wicca, in the 1950s. Presented typically as a surviving strand of an ancient tradition, in this case a surviving coven of witches in the New Forest, Wicca was instead the first manifestation of a modern form of paganism that brought the goddess of the right as an archaeologist to undiluted prominence, and that was also to prove enormously successful. Although it differed from Druidry in its general disregard for ancient monuments, its focus on the moon, and its emphasis on working in private, it was clearly influenced by the proximity of its birth to Gardner's involvement in the Druid Order, and in particular his friendship with another significant figure in the development of modern paganism, Ross Nichols, the Druid Order's scribe. Nichols, a teacher, historian, poet, and painter, aided Gardner in the writing of his first book about the new religion, Witchcraft Today, which was published in 1954. And one of the more far-reaching results of his influence on Wicca, Druidry, and paganism in general, was the creation of the Eightfold Year of Festivals, combining the solstices and the equinoxes with the quarter days at the start of February, May, August, and November, the Celtic festivals known as Imbolc, Beltane, Lunasa, and Sawane. Nichols had first embraced the concept of the Eightfold Year in the 1940s, primarily through research into the folklore of the British Isles. At the time, the Druid Order celebrated only two seasonal festivals, the summer solstice at Stonehenge, and the autumn equinox at Primrose Hill. But in 1956, influenced by Nichols, Robert MacGregor Read, who had taken over as chief Druid following his father's death, was persuaded to hold a vernal equinox ceremony near Tower Hill, which Nichols described as a traditional site of one of the places of free speech in Britain. This immediately became a regular ceremony, although Nichols' attempts to persuade the Order to adopt the other five festivals, the winter solstice and the quarters of the Celtic year, were frustrated, and it was left to Gardner's Wiccans to take them up instead. Significantly, Ross Nichols took the Eightfold Year with him when he split from the ancient Druid Order and set up his new Order, the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, in 1964. The impetus for Nichols' departure was a dispute over the leadership of the Order following the death of Robert MacGregor Read, which is rather long-winded to go into here, but it led to Nichols breaking with tradition by establishing three grades of initiation, Bard, Ovate, and Druid, and bringing to life his long-cherished dream of a seasonal round of ceremonies based on the Eightfold Year. And on a point of principle that should be heartening to all those concerned with open access to Stonehenge, Nichols' new offshoot promptly abandoned the summer solstice ceremonies at the Great Temple on Salisbury Plain, choosing instead to conduct their midsummer rituals at Hunsbury, an Iron Age hill fort near Northampton. Nichols' exodus was precipitated by restrictions on the general public based on complaints about hooliganism and general rowdiness that were imposed in 1964, when the Temple was fenced off with electrified wire and access was restricted to certain types of Druids only. And that's the summer solstice in 1966 with no members of the public. In Nichols' own words, after experience of this, the main Order refused to function under circumstances whereby the people, unruly or not, were kept away from the publicly owned oldest national shrine on the day of the year designed for its cult. He added, the answer should of course have been a few more police, not barbed wire. While the goddess theories and the new dawn of witchcraft and Druidry were fermenting in the ether, and while the first hippies were strumming guitars in the field besides Stonehenge on solstice morning, the 1960s counterculture crashed in on Stonehenge and from an even more unlikely source. The ufologist Tony Wedd, whose speculations about UFO activity in the countryside of southern England, led a small group of aficionados to rediscover the works of Alfred Watkins, establishing the Lay Hunters Society and turning up at Avery on a field trip in 1962. Undergoing a transformation that mirrored the counterculture in general, the Lay Hunters opened a path for increasingly cosmic field trips, resulting in 1969 in the publication of John Michel's The View Over Atlantis. That's John at Stonehenge in 1986. This, the founding document of a movement that became known as Earth Mysteries, revived Stonehenge, Avebury and Glastonbury as centres of mystical power and introduced themes of geomancy, earth energies and sacred geometry, which began to exert a powerful influence on those interested in both archaeology and spirituality. Among the first people to seize on Michel's ideas were Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill, the organisers of the 1971 Glastonbury Fair, which took place over the solstice weekend at Worthy Farm in Pilton. Well-heeled and well-connected, Kerr and Churchill felt that the other festivals of the time were over-commercialised and redressed the balance with a privately funded event whose spiritual angle echoed down the years. Inspired by John Michel, Andrew Kerr had actually wanted to hold his free festival at Stonehenge with a circular stage to celebrate the summer solstice there, but when he met Michael Eavis, the plans shifted to Glastonbury. He took from John Michel the correspondence between the pyramids and the sacred sites of England and set about erecting a pyramid stage as the centrepiece of the festival, planning it as a scaled-down model of the Great Pyramid and even seeking personal advice from John Michel himself, who suggested that the proportions should be based on the dimensions of Stonehenge. Within a few years, another visionary figure, Phil Russell, an eccentric, privately funded orphan who was also known as Wally Hope, unwittingly fulfilled Andrew Kerr's original dream, setting up a free festival at Stonehenge that confirmed the temple as a multi-faceted counter-cultural icon, entertaining anarchists, hippies, followers of John Michel and a cast of prominent characters from the counter-cultural milieu of the time, whose spiritual inclinations were to play a prominent role as the festival's popularity grew. These included Bev Richardson, now living in Ireland, who as a teenager had had a life-changing encounter with the elderly Gerald Gardner and who was central to the festival's connection with the stones as a pagan free spirit and a prominent traveller. Rick Mays, better known as Rick the Vic, whose forays into interfaith dialogue prefigured the developments of the following decades, and Sid Rawl who had founded the Hyde Park Diggers in 60s London, based on the example provided by Gerald Will Stanley's Diggers in the years following the English Civil War. Sid became a prominent figure in the free festival scene, helping organise the Windsor Free Festival which ran for three August Bank holiday weekends from 1972 to 1974, but which was violently broken up by the police that final year, and he's credited with convincing the authorities that if no further attempt was made to occupy Windsor Great Park, the festival goers would be left in peace at Stonehenge. After Russell's mysterious death in 1975, the festival assumed a new and potent spiritual angle when a number of the festival goers invaded the stones on the day of the solstice to scatter his ashes, establishing a rite of pilgrimage which was begrudgingly respected by the authorities until 1984, and that's a photo of Stonehenge in 1984, and which provided the basis for an evolving mixture of anarchy and mysticism that was to play a vital role in the development of modern paganism, the festival from the air. While the festival goers were blending their own mixture of paganism and radical politics at Stonehenge, it wasn't until 1976 that Avebury was definitively transformed into a powerful sacred landscape for the new paganism, when Michael Dames, an art historian, suggested in his book The Silbury Treasure that its builders had worshipped the great goddess, and had celebrated the quarter days of Imbolc, Beltane, Lunathir and Siwain, which as I've pointed out were first celebrated by Gerald Gardner's Wiccans and Ross Nichols' Order of Parasovics and Druids. Dames suggested that Silbury Hill itself had been sculpted as a representation of the great goddess, and cleverly combined archaeological discoveries from Silbury itself with folklore from Scotland and Ireland, to conclude that the Great Mound was actually a used by the people of the Neolithic to celebrate the goddess and the fertility of the land at Lunathir. The following year in the Avebury cycle, Dames extended his theory to include the rest of the Avebury complex, concocting a seasonal round that involved initiation rites at the sanctuary at Imbolc, celebrations of fertility in the stone circles at Beltane, and ceremonies at the West Kennet Long Barrow at Siwain. Along the way, other landscape features were incorporated, in particular the source of the River Kennet, Swallowhead Springs, which regularly dries up at Siwain, only to be reborn miraculously, or so it can appear, at Imbolc. For those who are unaware of the discrepancies in Michael Dames's theories, and there were many, including the fact that the monuments had not all been in use simultaneously, and the assumption that there had been a universal great goddess who had been worshipped throughout the Neolithic, the notion that several archaeologists had actually been assiduously demolishing for the previous decade. His vision was compelling, and it created almost overnight a full-blown contemporary mythology. As the historian Ronald Hutton has pointed out, Dames created ceremonies which people could perform, and so within a year people were there. That's why people dance on Silvery Hill at the August full moon. The women referred to by Ronald Hutton were spiritual feminists, who were inspired by the growth of feminism, paganism, and the peace movement, which was focused in Britain on the proposed cruise missile base at Greenham Common in Berkshire. Throughout the early 1980s they were drawn in increasing numbers to Avebury, where they held a number of women's peace festivals. The first of these took place at Lunasa in 1984, when a local newspaper, under the salacious headline, Naked Women Moon Worshippers Who Invaded Avebury at the Weekend Are Gone, reported that 40 hippie women, many with children, arrived in the stone-circled village on Friday for a weekend of open-air worship. The report described how at the weekend, the women, some of them topless as they walked, made their way to the Ridgway, where they danced naked in the sunshine, and for moonlight rituals too. At Beltane in 1985, 200 women, mostly from Greenham, gathered on the summit of Silbury for a three-day pilgrimage to Stonehenge. In many ways, the Beltane walk was the pagan peace movement personified. The women chanted, sang, and danced on the summit of Silbury, and asked the goddess to bless us with cosmic energy, and threw us to join it with the energy of the earth, so that we might become cauldrons in an alchemical marriage. As their pilgrimage progressed, they confused the police who had been sent to stop them on Salisbury Plain by singing, we are the flow and we are the earth, we are the weavers and we are the web, we are the flow and we are the earth, we are the witches back from the dead. And they managed to reach the monument unmolested, where they performed an anarchic ritual, with many of them staying overnight, sleeping in the stone circle under the light of a full moon. Significantly, one of the women on 1985's Beltane walk, the woman focalizing our rituals in the words of Linda Lee, who later wrote an article about it for the magazine Festival Eye, was the American witch Starhawk, who had been trained in Gardnerian Wicca, and initiated into one of its North American derivations, and whose 1979 book The Spiral Dance had become the best-selling book on witchcraft to date, replacing Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today as the model text for would-be witches. In many ways, Starhawk and her reclaiming movement represented the coming of age and modern paganism, as Starhawk renewed the balance of female and male energies, updating the leaning towards the feminine, though not to the exclusion of the male, that had been one of Gardner's most radical bequests in the first place. And managing to reintegrate men without compromising her position as a spiritual leader of women, caught up at the forefront of the peace movement against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Her feelings about Stonehenge, published in 1987's Truth or Dare, revealed the manner in which she achieved this, leading a women's pilgrimage but identifying the monument with the wider environmental concerns of humanity as a whole. She wrote, Reinforced not only by Starhawk, but also by the popularity of other goddess-themed work, especially the writings of Maria Gimbertas, a California-based archaeologist whose excavations of Neolithic sites in Eastern Europe convinced her that a universal goddess had indeed been worshipped throughout the ancient world. The Greenham women's fascination with Aithbury continued into the 1990s. In 1992, Katrina Howes wrote from the peace camp, We try when we can to get to Silbury Hill, Aithbury Stone Circle and West Kennet Longbarrow, ancient matriarchal sacred sites. To go there is to be refreshed spiritually in the struggle against the patriarchy and its militarism. And in 1995, Rosie Bremmer and 12 other Greenham women undertook a walk from the Uffington White Horse along the ridgeway to Aithbury, camping on Silbury Hill, where they were observed by what they called very thuggish plainclothes police, and ending in the Great Stone Circle, where they moved from stone to stone, focusing on a ritual specifically to stop the Trident nuclear submarine project. It's also interesting to know that by this point the struggles of the Greenham women had partly contributed to the impulses behind a whole new protest movement, which also ended up focusing some of its spiritual concerns on Stonehenge and Aithbury. The anti-roads campaign began on Twyford Down in 1992, when two young travellers, appalled to discover that an extension to the M3 was about to be hacked through the downland on which they were camping, set up a protest camp that almost overnight became a national phenomenon, demonstrating a raw, untutored paganism that went further than any previous protest movement in embracing the concept of the whole of the earth as a sacred landscape. The majority of those who came to the road protest movement opposed the government's road expansion plans as the carving up of the Great Mother. That photo is actually from Stanworth Valley camp in 1995 in Manchester. The protesters, who became known as the Dongus tribe after an African name for the ancient tracks that crossed Twyford Down, also adopted the eightfold year that had by now become ubiquitous in modern paganism. One of them, Gary, described following the old pagan calendar of pre-Christian England, which is very dear to me now, as with anyone who is close to nature. And for this new wave of protesters, ancient sacred sites, and Stonehenge in particular, assumed a central symbolic position. Gary described Stonehenge as one big stone calendar, one of the most historic places in the world, and added that travellers meet there because of the celebration of summer. To be strictly accurate, what Gary should have said was that the travellers would have met there had it not been for the exclusion zone that was imposed around Stonehenge on the solstice every year from 1985 onwards, after the annual free festival was shut down with unprecedented violence at the Battle of the Beanfield. The Battle of the Beanfield occurred when a convoy of travellers, festival-goers, and green activists was ambushed in an operation that bore all the hallmarks of Margaret Thatcher's repressive response to those she deemed the enemy within, by a quasi-military police force of over 1,300 officers drawn from six counties in the Ministry of Defence. The operation not only shut down the free festival, it also paved the way for repressive anti-traveller legislation, and the curtailment of the public's right to gather freely, that are still exerting a baleful influence on civil liberties in the UK. After the Beanfield, the authorities made a few attempts to foist ticketed events on a mass of protesters who demanded free access for all, before establishing an exclusion zone around Stonehenge every summer solstice, which prevented almost everybody who wanted to from visiting their temple at the most numinous time. Recalling this period, another of the Dongers, Alex Plows, has written about how she and others were effectively forced to abandon Stonehenge, as they were unwilling to spend the solstice having a rut with the police. She added, it was hardly like we were depoliticised. Most of us were having a break from protest camps for a couple of weeks. We needed downtime to recharge in a sacred landscape. The alternative sacred landscape chosen by the Dongers was Avebury, where unlike Stonehenge, people were having lovely times in a more amenable landscape every summer, and the Dongers in particular were hanging out in a semi-permanent state of magic reality in Westwoods near Avebury. A whole bunch of us living in benders deep in the woods, wandering all over the landscape on moonlit nights. As well as catering to goddess worshippers, modern witches and pagan road protesters, Stonehenge and Avebury also began to draw adherents from a raft of new Druid orders, which began to emerge in the late 1980s. Five groups in particular were established at this time, one derived from the historical Druid tradition, one from Wicca, and the other three from the years of the Stonehenge Pre-Festival. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, which had ground to a halt when Ross Nichols died in 1975, was revived in 1988 by Philip Cargom, a psychotherapist who had been a teenage disciple of the elderly Nichols in the 1960s. That's Philip Cargom on the left being initiated on Glastonbury Tor. From Wicca came the British Druid Order, founded by the musician and poet Philip Shelcrest with the aim of establishing a native British spirituality. And from the festival years came the Secular Order of Druids, founded by Tim Sebastian, a passionate devotee of Jean-Michel. The Glastonbury Order, founded by Rollo Morphling, who had been involved in an offshoot of Gerald Gardner's Wicca. And last but not least, the loyal Arthurian War Band, led by Arthur Pendragon, a former soldier and biker leader who became involved in the road protest movement and who has been described by Ronald Hutton as a sincere natural mystic, whose very strong libertarian political convictions are bound up with a sense of guidance by supernatural forces. These five orders came together briefly to form an organisation known as the Council of British Druid Orders. While the Council's attentions were directed largely towards Stonehenge with mixed results, its most notable success was actually at Avebury, with the establishment of the Gorseth of Bards of Cair Avery. Based in the Stone Circles, the Gorseth developed from a multi-faith conference convened by Tim Sebastian of the Secular Order in 1993, and it was focused on a ceremony composed by Philip Shellcrest of the British Druid Order, using parts of the ceremony created and performed by Yolo McGannery on London's Primrose Hill in 1792. The Avebury Gorseth soon became regular occurrences, taking place on each of the festival days of the eightfold year and becoming, in Ronald Hutton's words, the central event of the new Druidry. By the late 1990s, they were attracting up to a thousand participants for each festival, with representatives from many different spiritual traditions, including druids, witches, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, heathens, Baha'i and shamans. That's a hand-fastening at Avebury from a few years ago. Despite this success, the differences between the various orders involved in the Council were such that the coalition soon split up. But while this was partly attributable to differences of opinion regarding access to Stonehenge, the incident that brought the Siberian conflict between the two camps to a head actually occurred in Avebury at Beltane in 1997. And even then, it was precipitated not by conflict between individual druids, but by pressure from the general public. As Ronald Hutton described it, various people shouted down the political druids when they began giving speeches on the progress of campaigns over Stonehenge and road-building schemes. The vast majority of people wanted to have a spiritual experience. They wanted the processions, the ceremonies of naming and After a tense weekend in which tempers flared and the National Trust Manager for Avebury joined the fray, making some unwise comments and raising, briefly, the prospect of some kind of battle of Avebury and a Stonehenge-like exclusion zone, separate days were agreed for future gatherings. Arthur and the political druids on the nearest Saturday to the festival days, and Philip Shellcrest and his company on the Sunday. While these developments were taking place at Avebury, Arthur Pendragon had also been campaigning assiduously to renew public access to Stonehenge. His mission began in the winter of 1990 when he embarked on a one-man sit-in outside the temple to protest at the charging of an entrance fee, and he lived for four months in a bunker between two trees, a modern-day mendicant reliant for food and drink on the generosity of strangers. At the solstice, he embarked on the first of a series of voluntary arrests for breaking through the exclusion zone that ran on down the years as persistently and pig-headedly as the authorities intransigence endured. That first year, he was arrested for possession of an offensive weapon, a sword Excalibur, at a party inside the exclusion zone. In 1992, he caused confusion in the police ranks by declaring that he and his companions were not in fact forming a procession of two or more people, which was illegal, but were only attempting to have a picnic. In 1993, he actually got through to the Stones, and the following year, accompanied by a documentary crew from Radio 4, he made it through to the Stones again, correctly predicting that the police would be reluctant to run through the whole embarrassing charade of arresting him in the presence of the media. The next few years saw an extraordinary increase in his activities, both against the exclusion zone at Stonehenge and as part of the road protest movement, which he had first become involved in at Beltane in 1993, when the Dongers had invited him to conduct a ceremony on Twyford Down. In 1996, he embraced the struggle on a full-time basis, joining the largest action to date, the campaign against the A34 Newbury bypass. That's Arthur on one of the 37 occasions that he was arrested at Newbury. On the summer solstice in 1996, he led the most concerted assault on the exclusion zone at Stonehenge, a multi-pronged barrage of intruders approaching the Forbidden Temple from all directions. By the end of the night, 27 people, including 13 Druids, had been arrested. While Arthur maintained his high-profile campaign, supported by the Secular Order and the Glastonbury Order, other Druid groups developed their own strategies. The Ancient Order of Druids, the friendly society that had been the first to visit Stonehenge in 1905, abandoned the Temple completely. And the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and the British Druid Order began negotiations for their own special access on the days around the solstice, while maintaining a secondary commitment to open access for all. Noticeably, the Ancient Druid Order, the only group that had not been involved at the Council, regained their traditional access for the solstice dawn in 1990, a privilege they held on to exclusively until 1995, when they finally accepted a compromise on special access with Ovate and the BDO, and shifted their rituals to one of the following days. Despite the concessions for the more malleable Druids at Stonehenge, however, it wasn't until 1998 that English Heritage finally came up with anything other than the exclusion zone that had spread a desolate silence over the Temple at the summer solstice for over a decade. They were prompted by the experimental access arrangements introduced at the Vernal Equinox that year, when over 200 people had been granted access, and all of them had left peacefully at the conclusion of the celebrations. Even so, the proposals put forward for the solstice were almost exactly the same as those that had last been attempted with disastrous results 10 years before. 500 free tickets for dates on and around the solstice were offered in advance to a wide range of interested parties. But although around 250 people took up the offer, those who were committed to open access for all had no option but to turn it down yet again. At the solstice, the gulf between those with and without tickets was as pronounced as it had ever been. Arthur maintained his customary campaign for free access for all, getting himself arrested, which was odd, as the author C.J. Stone noted, because he actually had a ticket to get in. But that's Arthur for you. In the meantime, around 100 people, including representatives of six different Druid groups, other pagans, locals, archaeologists, and 40 press reporters and photographers, all took advantage of the special access arrangement. Although according to the majority of reports, it was not an entirely satisfactory occasion. Emma Restlore of the British Druid Order noted that with as many press as there were Druids, pagans, and others, the whole event was very difficult. The last stage in this long-running farce took place in 1999, shortly after an appeal court of the House of Lords, which included Lord Hutton and the Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, had finally ruled that the exclusion zone around Stonehenge was actually illegal. Ignoring the threat posed by several thousand people being allowed to congregate outside the perimeter fence, instead of facing the handcuffing and arrest scenario that had been prevalent since 1989, English Heritage offered a thousand free tickets over the solstice period, and those committed to open access were again obliged to refuse. On solstice night, several thousand people duly turned up, and around 2am, a few hundred celebrants broke down the perimeter fence and proceeded to occupy the stones. The night ended in clashes with the police and 23 arrests, and there was much lamenting from various commentators who tried to blame the occupation on class war activists. In reality, given that the exclusion zone had been lifted, but that the access restrictions on congregating at Stonehenge had not, it was far more likely that the invasion was simply a spontaneous demonstration of frustration by those with a long history of exclusion. In light of this rather shambolic performance by English Heritage and the police, few could have suspected how swiftly and how decisively both parties would respond to the full ramifications of the House of Lords decision. But in the months that followed the solstice in 1999, both English Heritage and the police reached the inevitable conclusion that the prohibition on access to the stones of the solstice was now effectively unworkable. After 16 years of prohibition, a mixture of compromise, conciliation, and common sense prevailed, and on the morning of the 21st of June 2000, over 6,000 people duly turned up to take advantage of the new détente, crowding into the stones to celebrate the crucial dawn, even though it rained all night and the sunrise was invisible. Despite the weather, it was a night of unbridled celebration for all those who had experienced the solstice at the stones in the years before the Battle of the Beanfield, and all those who had been unable to do so in the years since. As Arthur Pendragon explained to a reporter, this is what it's all about. The only thing that I believe in is that this is our henge, and that it's open to every ******, not just druids, not just pagans, but to everyone who wants to come here, and that's what I've been fighting for. It's the culmination of 14 years' work. If Arthur's words were of ringing vindication of the efforts of all those who had struggled for years to liberate the solstice celebration at the stones, it was left to festival veteran Margaret Greenfield to capture a more emotional side to the event. In her words, I was surprised as I stumbled across those ruts in the field clutching the hand of my 10-year-old daughter that I had tears running down my face. We were back, and I tell you, I wasn't the only person I saw that night in tears. A lot of old faces. Often we just nodded at each other, no need for words. It was one of the most emotional times of my life. And this more or less is how the situation stands now. At Stonehenge, the number of people attending the summer solstice has grown enormously over the last five years, with around 20,000 people now attending each event. From my own experience, the gatherings have generally been relaxed and good-natured, a heady mixture of a stoned libertarian tribal gathering and a spiritual free-for-all, although not everyone's happy with the developments. Members of various druid groups feel that the druids have been squeezed out of the celebrations, and some local councillors have also been critical. At a meeting of Amesbury Town Council in 2002, for example, the Mayor, Neil Morrison, highlighted what he saw as widespread alcohol and drug abuse, suggesting that there were too many people, and concluding that it was a desperately frightening situation, and it reminded me of the problems of the 1980s. And Councillor John Turner, a retired mayor, sorry, a retired major, added with an old-fashioned oratorical flourish that would not have been out of place any time in the previous century. A little too much freedom under the law has been given to the ungodly, and it is fast becoming a situation where the tail is wagging the dog. The renewal of solstice access at Stonehenge has also had a knock-on effect at Avebury, where several thousand people now gather for the solstice, displacing to some extent the traditional focus on Beltane and Swain, although the other festival days continue to attract attention. Other groups and individuals with their own takes on Avebury's spiritual resonance also continues to be drawn to the complex, and a pagan pride day in September has now joined the calendar of events that take place in the circles. There are, however, detractors at Avebury too, and these are potentially more worrying than Stonehenge's critics. While the increase in visitors to Avebury has caused some minor concern to established pagan groups, the response of various members of the parish council has been almost hysterical. In the aftermath of the solstice in 2002, Chairman John Cronk raised the spectre of the bean field, commenting, I have always been concerned about the risk of confrontation in the village, and the police's representative was obliged to assure him that next year the police would be in Avebury in much greater numbers. In the meantime, the council embarked on plans to restrict access on the solstice, putting pressure on the National Trust to end its long-standing tolerance of camping and overnight parking in the car park, and more contentiously enraging everyone, from pagans and travellers to the Council for the Protection of England, by painting double yellow lines on all the roadside verges in and around the village in the week before the solstice in 2003. On the night, while 30,000 people cavorted at Stonehenge, many of the thousands who had gathered at Avebury instead found that their enjoyment was marred by a heavy-handed policy towards their vehicles, which had arisen as a direct result of the council's determination to restrict parking, aided by the increased police presence that was promised. Fortunately, a new working group to provide a forum for liaison between pagans, locals, landowners and the National Trust, modelled on round-table discussions that helped pave the way for the renewed access at Stonehenge, seems to have dispelled some of this tension at Avebury in recent years, and I hope that this will remain the case, and that Avebury can continue to balance its many roles as a World Heritage Site, a living village, and a sacred space of extraordinary resonance. If I have a complaint about the current status of the celebrations at Stonehenge in Avebury, it's that many of those who now visit Stonehenge on the solstice seem to be little more than tourists, either there for a free party, or to witness a sunrise that has more to do with the consumer society's obsession with things you have to do than with anything more meaningful. I'm also aware, however, that the casual visitor to Stonehenge has more chance to engage with the temple on the solstice than during an average tourist trip, when there is no opportunity to walk among the stones, and that this direct experience of a living temple, rather than of something that resembles a museum, can have a profound impact that may draw the casual visitor back again with a more discerning and inquiring mind. To this end, I'd like to conclude with some words that John Michel wrote after the Battle of the Beanfield. Those who knew not of Stonehenge, who had never experienced its weird and lasting attraction, were astounded. What is this old pile of rocks which inspires such intensity of personal religious feeling, and such vicious expressions of official jealousy? Thank you very much. This has been a Megalithomania audio production. For more information visit megalithomania.co.uk