Of course there was the matter of the enemy within that loomed large in the Thatcher era, and those always referred to in the press as travellers, including you and me, if we visited Wiltshire in the summer, whether we were gainfully employed owner-occupiers, made no difference, our journeys, our visits, were made to seem breaches of the law, what law was never quite clear as Wiltshire seemed to have its own laws independently made up on the spur of expediency.

When police were asked in 1989 by one walker why they could not proceed along a certain green track, the answer was it was taboo. In athropological terms, this suggests the track or the person on it, to be ritually unclean. A legally minded colleague demanded of the Inspector when he arrived, which section of the statute of Taboo was being invoked but did not receive a reply. Was it the press who invented such historically fascinating phrases as an illegal festival, a legal device of an Order banning hippies, and the most famous of all, The Exclusion Zone, or were these inventions of a Thatcherite think tank? After all one remembers there was an exclusion zone in the Falklands, remember the one that The Belgrano wasn't in, and was steaming away from, when we are told, the Prime Minister personally gave the order to fire the torpedoes that sunk her? In the end are we to recognise there was a whole culture of apartheid, of us and them, which the government, Wiltshire authorities, media and parts of the British public, all participated in and helped create? And was this part of a wider, political and social movement through the 1970s and 1990s? Only just waiting to be dismantled?

With their final Act, the Criminal Justice Act, the tories legalised that power to create an exclusion zone around Stonehenge, that previously had been but deception and rhetoric. By positing a thing called a Trespassory Assembly consisting of 20 or more persons, a power was invoked under which anybody could be arrested if an Order was in force, for being anywhere in a large territory in numbers over 20, or for persisting in proceeding towards a place where such an assembly might not have occured yet and even would not on fact ever occur, but in the mind of a policeman there was a threat that it might have done.

So upon June 1st 1995, the 10th anniversary of the incident in the Beanfield, Bristol acrivists Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd were protesting by the roadside at Stonehenge, and refusing to move away when told they were part of a trespassory assembly, they were arrested and prosecuted. On appeal the conviction was quashed. It was argued successfully that the public had to in some way, exceed the normal use of the highway to be trespassors, and standing peacefully by the verge they did not do so. The authorities appealed upwards and the verdict went the other way again. It was held the Act created a special circumstance, where an Order having been made, an assembly that then occurred was in defiance of the Order and of its very nature a trespass.

Very recently the House of Lords has looked at this, dismissed the conviction, and stated or restated the law, to clearly say that there is a positive right of assembly and protest on the highway, provided there is no obstruction or other nuisance. The casting judgement (it went 3-2) of The Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine (mostly known so far for his taste in luxurious wallpaper) is being carefully studied by Wiltshire Constabulary in this respect. One thing seems clear, that whether the police apply for banning orders for this summer, or decline to do so, there will be no Exclusion Zone in Wiltshire any more. It's illegal. Probably any reasonable number of peaceful sensible people can use the highways of Wiltshire, and it might be expected, that knowing it to be so, that they will.