During the 1980's there were issues concerning access to Stonehenge on the solstice. Druids wanted to worship within the stones, hippies thought that it would be cool to watch. Wiltshire county council weren't as keen on the idea. Anyway, to cut a long story short, if you had long hair and a bus, it became vitally important that you watch the druids perform the ceremony and, obviously, you would want to be there a few weeks early in order to have a festival and party. That may sound glib, and anti-hippy, but at the time there were a lot of part-time hippies, just along for the ride. They did more to damage the travelling community than any wheel clamp ever could (in my humble opinion). Their actions saw the druids banned from the stones, unable to perform their rituals. They cost the tax payer hundreds of thousands of pounds through the extra policing needed, and they put another nail in the coffin of the peaceful relationship between travellers and the local community. I will try to give a balanced account of Westbury's hippie connection.
In June of 1985 things hade come to a head. A court injunction had been obtained, preventing the annual druid ceremony and the preceding free party, over fears that more damage would be done to Stonehenge. As the hippies approached the four and a half mile exclusion zone they clashed with some very determined policemen. The final score was 1:0 to the police. If you would like to read an account of the Battle of the Beanfield from the point of view of a photographer who was living and travelling with the group at the time - Click Here.
Having been denied Stonehenge, many of the hippies decided come to sunny Westbury - and have a party on the horse. Alan Lodge (Tash) has very kindly donated a couple of images taken at the time. Tash recalls:
yeah, we were there after the beanfield fighting. We had been through a legal process and in custody for some days. After leaving Savernake forest, we travelled to Westbury, that might have been a bit of a 'back door' route to Stonehenge, across the plain. Exactly at the same time that the Army decided to undertake live firing exercises for the next few days. Fancy that. :-)
I don't have much recollection of time there, not so much happened really, any idea of a festival and celebration was a bit subdued, after what had happened. and with so many buses with smashed windows, and it rained for a week, the whole thing was a bit of a refugee camp.
While most of the travellers were nice people, there was a criminal element within the group. The local shops and pubs were forced to close after they were stripped bare of beer and food (You can't have a party without beer and food)! While researching this page I repeatedly encountered a story about hippies, going into the local supermarket and urinating in the meat fridges. Obviously all the meat had to be thrown out, and the hippies were outside waiting by the bins! This story is probably just rumour and hearsay, but it was too good to not make it onto the page! An impartial view would discount the story - Would the hippy community want to eat meat that had been urinated on?
The next morning, Westbury woke to discover that the White Horse was now a unicorn! It wasn't until the hippies left that the method of transformation was uncovered - sheets, pegged to the ground. Simple, temporary, funny. Once the hippies had gone, the top of the horse was temporarily closed so the toilet holes could be filled in, and rubbish removed, then life returned to normal, until the next year.
The hippies enjoyed being in Westbury so much that they decided to come back the following year, but this time the police were ready. Just before the solstice the police deployed their secret weapon, "the anti-hippy skip" - earth filled skips left in the middle of all the approach roads to the horse. In the years that followed the hippies searched for an "anti-anti-hippy skip" device, but never really succeeded, so they went somewhere else.