For the first three years of the 1980s Inglestone Common in South Gloucestershire had been a regular destination on the free festival circuit. In 1989 the Common was reintroduced as the venue for the Avon Free Festival, a gathering that took place at an agreed site in the county across the final weekend of May. This was a date that coincided with the month’s second bank holiday, traditionally a time of early summer debauchery in Britain; the location was usually confirmed mere hours before the festival began. The free festivals of the 1980s had now been transformed and, in the view of many participants, revived as free parties a decade later. The Avon Free Festival was again held at Inglestone Common in 1990, although a significantly larger police presence there that year ensured a new site would be needed for the festival in 1991, when Sodbury Common, near Chipping Sodbury, was chosen as a suitable destination. That year the Avon Free Festival was attended by an estimated fifteen thousand people and demonstrated the free party version of raving was capable of attracting as many numbers as its legal, commercial equivalent.

With the gradual conversion of free festivals from an environment where music was provided by bands playing live, to parties hosted by sound systems, their popularity had increased substantially. The Avon Free Festival of 1990 had attracted sufficiently large numbers for the Avon and Somerset Police to launch an ongoing surveillance and intelligence-gathering procedure known as Operation Nomad. During the 1991 festival the force executed a stop and search policy on the main roads leading to Sodbury Common that resulted in over fifty arrests during the course of the weekend.

By the spring of 1992 the various police forces of the West Country and South West had anticipated and planned for an event on a similar scale to take place over that year’s second May Bank Holiday weekend. The peripatetic nature of the Avon Free Festival meant that the police’s ability to prohibit the party from taking place was limited; an injunction cannot be granted for an event whose location or date is unknown. Instead consecutive forces deployed the similar tactic of requesting that anyone they suspected of living like Travellers, or of being prospective free party-goers, disperse from their respective perimeters. The result was a mass herding operation conducted across the West and South West of Britain, which enabled each of the relevant constabularies to clear its county lines of potential troublemakers. By the Thursday of the bank holiday weekend, with the weather set fair, vehicles had started to gather at Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire in significant numbers. The constant flow of Travellers and ravers that had been directed away from various rural counties added to the sense of a critical mass developing at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Opinion is divided as to whether Castlemorton had previously been agreed as the site for that weekend’s festival by the owners of the various sound systems and anyone else involved in making such a decision, or whether the police had concluded the expansive common in Worcestershire was of a sufficiently large scale to accommodate the thousands of people they had suspected as potential attendees of the Avon Free Festival. If the latter was the reason that year’s festival was staged at Castlemorton, it was due to the encouragement of local authorities, MPs and police chiefs that tens of thousands travelled towards a destination set securely in the heart of Middle England.

Whichever argument is to be trusted, throughout the following week the largest illegal party ever witnessed in Britain took place. Attendance is estimated to have been between twenty-five and forty thousand people, with a concentration of numbers over the long weekend. That such a high volume of party-goers decided to travel to Castlemorton is unsurprising as the festival received ongoing coverage on local news programmes throughout the bank holiday. These reports functioned as an impromptu advertisement for anyone looking forward to spending the long weekend in a hedonistic fashion. The fact that the Glastonbury festival had not taken place the previous year ensured that, during a fine weekend in late May, which often signals the arrival of summer, a significant number of people in the country were prepared to vigorously enjoy themselves.

The festival had attracted all the major autonomous sound systems. Each set up equipment in their own dedicated space; it was probably the one and only occasion when Adrenalin, DiY, Spiral Tribe, Techno Travellers, Bedlam, Circus Warp and others gathered together under the same sky to broadcast their hardcore version of techno. The music was a distant but relentless audio backdrop to the television news bulletins, which by the Saturday all included interviews with the police.

Senior officers were interviewed on their respective local channels (a feature on Television South West charmingly referred to the mass illegal rave as a ‘pop concert’; the station would lose its broadcast franchise by the end of the year). In each instance they rehearsed the lack of options available to them to safeguard the public: the policing of such a large amount of people required an amount of officers unavailable to them; Castlemorton was common rather than private land; it was uncertain that the existing bye-laws concerning congregation or noise pollution could be applied to the type of event into which the free festival had developed; as they were unable to prove those in attendance were residing at the site, the regulatory powers available to the police were redundant.

What was also doubtless a matter of serious, if unspoken, concern to the police was the ability of those gathered at the free festival to self-govern. The footage of harried residents of the nearby village and frustrated MPs and other dignitaries looking out over the mass of trucks, buses, tents, people and dogs supported the narrative that the organisers and festivalgoers had lost control of events. The air quality around the site had also become noticeably different. Although seasoned Travellers always carried a shovel with which to attend to their personal needs, many of the weekend ravers present were less prepared.

Once the Castlemorton Festival had reached its natural conclusion, with the police having made a scant fifty arrests, elements of the national media immediately determined that the case for new legislation against free festivals, convoys and raves had rarely been clearer. Their editorials amplified the voices in Parliament speaking in favour of altering the law to make sure an event such as Castlemorton could never be repeated. The Home Secretary Michael Howard, who was of a more heavy-handed temperament than his predecessor Douglas Hurd and who had held the position for little more than a year, undertook the process of preparing the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. In less than two years after Castlemorton, Parliament passed the Act now widely perceived to be one of the most draconian pieces of legislation placed before the House.

At the time of its approval, the ‘anti rave clauses’ featured in the Act as a means of ensuring that events such as Castlemorton could never be repeated drew the most significant attention. The ramifications of the Act have outlived the phenomena of raves and free parties. They include the criminalisation and suppression of non-violent protest, the creation of a police DNA database that held information about members of the public who had never committed a criminal offence, and the introduction of ‘precautionary’ arrests.

Part V of the Bill was titled ‘Public Order: Collective Trespass or Nuisance on Land’. It contained seven sections (61–7), each with numerous subsections and clauses, relating to ‘Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave’, which was defined as a ‘gathering of more than 100 people’.

Due to its clumsy legalese and the awkward, if not pompous manner with which the government had struggled in its attempt to define ‘music’, one particular piece of text in Section 63 grew into a cause célèbre. Subsection 1 clause b stated that music ‘includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. Thus the Home Office equated the sound of an illegal rave with that of an Evangelical Christian Service in which members of the congregation were encouraged to clap and sing along.

While that clause became a subject of ridicule and helped galvanise widespread opposition to the Bill, Section 63 included over ten subsections replete with qualifiers and clauses that suggested a need on the part of the government to preclude any form of disturbance, regardless of type. One of the most disturbing sections stated: (8) A constable in uniform who reasonably suspects that a person is committing an offence under this section may arrest him without a warrant. To widespread surprise the Bill had passed its final reading unopposed by the Labour Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair.

A number of free parties were staged in protest against the Bill, including a mass rally at Hyde Park that led to confrontations between police and public. Once the Bill had been approved, the new laws of Section 63 were enacted and over the ensuing three or four years the free party movement and Convoy were substantially reduced in scale.

The changes forced upon this community were hard to endure and the comedown that followed was severe. Life as part of the Convoy had always been basic, austere and fraught with difficulties. It had nevertheless afforded a genuine sense of freedom and an alternative to the difficult conditions from which many participating in the Traveller life had escaped. An intense experience of liberty, amplified by dancing to music in open spaces while on drugs such as MDMA and LSD, was a defining characteristic of free parties, and some of those no longer able to achieve such profound highs sought solace in the hopelessness of harder drugs.

The fact that government had passed a law that specifically addressed the legality of raves was the subject of much outcry in the music and entertainment media. In these accounts the Bill was regularly abbreviated to the Criminal Justice Bill or CJB, which overshadowed and underestimated the full significance of other new laws the Act implemented. The full title, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, gave a better illustration of the regressive nature of much of the legislation. Within the same Section that addressed the culture of raves were contained a number of changes to the legal definition of trespass, including a highly symbolic offence of ‘Aggravated Trespass’.

Anyone suspected of this new crime could face arrest and, if convicted, a prison sentence of three months. Under the previous law trespass had been considered a civil, never a criminal offence. Those accused might now be forcibly removed by a landowner or a person in a position of responsibility such as a gamekeeper and appear before the magistrate, or even a judge as Benny Rothman and his friends had done sixty years earlier, after walking up Kinder Scout. The new definition of trespass as set out in the 1994 Public Order Act was now a matter for the police:

Legal experts assumed part of the motivation for this change in definition was to criminalise the practice of hunt sabotage. The first arrests made under the new law in November 1994 were duly three saboteurs, who intended to disrupt a meet in Northamptonshire.

Nevertheless, within weeks of the law passing into the statute book the new Public Order section was being enacted in a subtler, perhaps less anticipated manner.

Members of the Ramblers Association reported encountering new signs appearing on familiar footpaths. In the Scottish Highlands a group of walkers were met with a notice reading: ‘Keep Out. Deer stalking in progress. You may be arrested under the Criminal Justice Act.’

The Head of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland made public his concerns that landowners were interpreting the law as they saw fit. ‘Anyone could be charged with this offence if a landowner believes they have affected some estate activity, whether intentionally or not.’

In addition Kate Ashbrook, the chair of the Ramblers’ Association and a lifelong campaigner for access, was leading a group across the Pennines when she found their route obstructed by barbed wire and notices stating ‘Keep Out’. The Ramblers’ Association raised its concerns, citing the example that by walking along a field as sheep were being rounded up they could be accused of disrupting a lawful action, without any prior knowledge or intention of doing so. The acts of taking photographs of the countryside, singing, even birdwatching all risked selective legal interpretation. Common sense largely prevailed.

What was certain was authority once more resided with landowners. In the intervening years between the mass trespass of 1932 and the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 a new relationship between the people of a country and its land had been established. Now it had reached its conclusion.

During those years, rural Britain witnessed exceptional change and also a significant change in its use. Attempts were made at new methods of farming, of living from or simply existing on the land. Few were entirely successful but the energy and spirit in which they were undertaken affected the public’s consciousness of and connection to the landscape. The few areas of Britain under national ownership witnessed an alteration in our perception and use of natural spaces; of how we might preserve their beauty while recognising them as our own.

So little of the United Kingdom is open land. Unless one is fortunate, to go in search of nature is to seek a form of permission or to abide by a designated set of behaviours. A people are nothing without the ability to congregate together in the outdoors, under the sky. In the twentieth century this need was demonstrated in terms of survival, protest, hedonism and the search for personal freedom. And where people congregate there is invariably music. Whenever the landscape acquiesced to these demands and desires, its custodians proved more resistant. In contrast, the larks overhead ascended in their approval.

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To the uninitiated the distance between the city centre of Glasgow and the banks of Loch Lomond is almost unnerving. By car the journey lasts less than an hour; in light traffic it can be made in forty-five minutes. In comparison to most British cities there is little gradation in the built environment. Instead there is a dizzying sensation of transportation, as the metropolitan energy of the city is exchanged for the expansive wilderness of the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park. These are two distinct worlds, but travelling between them the thought occurs that their proximity sustains the independence and authority of each.

Once past the small town of Balloch at the southern end of Loch Lomond the visitor can choose to drive along its twenty-two miles on either the east or west bank. A few miles north, on the western side, is an inconspicuous set of buildings that constitute the outdoor premises of a University of Glasgow research faculty. The small compound includes a beach, from where there is an expansive view of the loch including the looming presence of Ben Lomond on its eastern bank.

It was on this secluded beach that Keith McIvor, the DJ and promoter of Pure, the Edinburgh club night, held a secret rave on the summer solstice of 1991.

McIvor, who would go on to have a career as an international DJ and found the highly influential Optimo club in Glasgow, had been offered the location by a friend whose father worked at the university and from whom he had surreptitiously borrowed a key to the gates of the research faculty. Two or three hundred people attended the rave and danced as the gentle tide rippled on the small beach and the sun rose over Ben Lomond in the distance. McIvor once described the moment of the early hours on this solstice morning to me as ‘quite shamanic’.

Pure was the first club in Scotland to play techno. The club’s sound and lighting systems were unusually powerful and created an intense environment for the audience, which included a regular weekly coach party from Glasgow. The club-goers were members of the incipient rave community in Central Scotland. Free parties were held at similar beach locations to Loch Lomond, or in abandoned farm buildings in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh and, notably, in a disused quarry in the city’s well-appointed area of Blackford. Among the weekly audience at Pure were two brothers, Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, who like McIvor hailed from the village of Balerno in the Edinburgh suburbs.

For several years during this era of raves, parties and the weekly Pure night, Sandison and Eoin experimented with tapes and treated recordings before releasing their debut twelve-inch ‘Twoism’ as Boards of Canada in 1994.

It is uncertain whether the brothers were in attendance at the Pure raves held over the summer solstice on the banks of Loch Lomond, although the material on their debut album Music Has the Right to Children is suggestive of a similar environment; where the shared experience of music in a rural setting is had under the influence of the landscape as well as stimulants. Upon its release in 1998 the consistently slower pace of Music Has the Right to Children represented a departure from the prevailing currents in electronic music. Since its development in the late 1980s electronic music had maintained a trajectory towards the future. Its momentum was upheld by the increase in tempo registered by each progressive micro-shift in the genre. By the middle of the 1990s the accelerated pace of drum and bass and Gabber, the latter a style especially popular in Scotland, had condensed music and rhythm into a relentless propulsion.

The sense of entering a hermetic space for the course of Music Has the Right to Children’s hour-long duration was further enhanced by the introduction of an element that had been rarely been a presence within the genre: the past. The cover of the record is a family portrait, which in its backdrop and composition suggests a holiday photograph. The cut of the clothes place the picture in the 1970s, but the other hallmarks of age and wear appear more artificial. The faces in the photograph have been digitally erased and in contrast to the sepia tones associated with faded Kodachrome prints the colouration is a greenish turquoise.

The seventeen tracks on the album vary in length; a handful last for over six minutes, while seven pieces are of roughly a minute’s duration. Several of the shorter tracks, notably the opener, ‘Wildlife Analysis’, ‘Kaini Industries’ and ‘Olson’, contain the album’s prettiest melodies. These have echoes of the music used in public information or documentary films from the era of the album’s cover artwork. The duo took their name from the National Film Board of Canada, and their childhood recollections of watching the company’s nature documentaries informed their music’s aesthetic. Reflecting on these experiences from the past was also presumably what led Sandison and Eoin to include the children’s voices that are heard with varying degrees of clarity throughout the album. Much of Music Has the Right to Children is the sound of, if not memories, then the more subtle, uncontrollable impulses by which memory works.

The past is also physically present in the sound of the album. The duo had amassed a large personal library of cassettes that contained recordings from television and other sources with which they had experimented since their inception. The average fidelity of these recordings and the passage of time had given them an aural patina similar to the effects of colouration suggested by the album’s artwork. Sandison and Eoin mixed short passages of voices, incidental music and celluloid ambience from their tape archive into their own recordings. These snatched fragments of laughter from long ago, adrift in the fog of simple, childhood melodies, contribute greatly to the record’s atmosphere of disconcerting numbness.

A recording of wind that runs throughout ‘Triangles & Rhombuses’ is one of the most audible examples of the influence of the natural world on this album, echoed in song titles such as ‘Wildlife Analysis’, ‘An Eagle in Your Mind’ and ‘Turquoise Hexagon Sun’. The latter is a name the duo used for their home studio in the Pentland Hills. It is also a vivid description of how the first light of morning might look during a shamanic rave in rural Scotland.

Standing on the small shore next to the University of Glasgow premises where McIvor and his friends had danced at the start of that decade, it is easy to imagine the landscape imprinting itself on the disorientated minds that witnessed the solstice here together. There are eagles in the sky, and once the generators had been switched off in the morning and the music had ended, the hypnotic sound of the tide must have sounded calm and powerful.

Music Has the Right to Children was released near the end of a century. Through word of mouth the record found a large constituency beyond electronic music purists; its disconcerting combination of reflection and psychological intensity registered with the times. For a listener in a certain mood, the reflective ambience, ghostly voices and the presence of the outdoors in the music represented an elegy for the rave years.

The symbolism of a new century provided the opportunity for an evaluation of the manner in which the British landscape should be managed. A repurposing of the Common Agricultural Policy was announced for the end of the millennium. From 1999 farmers were increasingly paid more for the stewardship of the land than for their produce, stock or harvest. The subsidies they received were assigned around environmental needs and measures, as the effects of a fifty-year preoccupation with intensive farming became visible in a topography denuded of native species and experiencing the desolation of climate change. Payments to farmers were made according to the scale of the land they farmed and no longer took into consideration the yield the land provided in stock or crops. The benefits to the countryside of a subsidy system that discouraged overproduction were quickly seen in a more diverse landscape and in the planting of native species such as willow, birch and beech. This new system once more introduced an economy of scale that ensured farms with the highest acreage, which in Britain consistently means the wealthiest, received the largest payments.

A decisive alteration in the country’s relationship to the land was brought into being by the CROW (Countryside and Rights of Way) Act of 2000, which introduced the ‘Right to Roam’ in open country such as moors, heaths and mountainside. The Act allowed ramblers and birdwatchers increased access to hinterlands and a further sense of identification with the landscape; but meanwhile, for all the miles of this newly opened space, the criminal act of Aggravated Trespass introduced in 1994 remained on the statute book.

Within a year of such significant changes the British countryside experienced the crisis of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease epidemic. The disease was vigorous and had been absent from the United Kingdom since 1967; the measures in place to manage an outbreak had failed to anticipate the changes in farming methods, and contamination was active for almost nine months. The source of the contagion was never officially named, but a pig farm in Northumberland whose owner regularly fed catering waste to his animals was frequently claimed to be the source, while there was also speculation he may have been scapegoated due to having a poor record of husbandry that included past offences.

From its outbreak in February 2001 over two thousand cases of the disease were recorded during the year. The culling that accompanied its proliferation was necessarily brutal: over six million cattle, sheep and pigs were destroyed. The images of fields of burning livestock created a nightmarish vision of rural Britain in a state of emergency. A sense of systemic collapse was reinforced by the application of exclusion zones throughout the countryside, which for many months experienced the eeriness and lifelessness that accompanies moments of great change. The acrid smell of incinerated livestock lingered in the air.