The Archive
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Cissbury Ring Near Worthing . Sussex. August 23-25th 1980 |
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all photos © Steve Bayfield |
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Cissbury Ring is an ancient hill fort on the South Downs, in the civil parish of Findon, about 5 km north of the seaside town of Worthing in the English county of West Sussex. It is the largest hill fort in Sussex and among the largest in Britain overall. The earthworks that form the fortifications were built around the beginning of the Middle Iron-Age but abandoned in the period 50 BC - 50 AD.Its also supposed to be haunted by various ghosts. oooheeeoooh....... A small congregation of freaks were drawn to the Ring for a free festival in August 1980. It was a tiny festival as you can see from the phtographs kindly provided by the esteemed musician Steve Bayfield taken on the 24th August. Peter Oaks writes : The pics of Cissbury are quite a turn-up! The Festival itself was, as you can see, quite a cosy affair. It was situated on top of the ring itself: if you look closely at the first picture (With the "Main" stage) you can just see the inner rampart ring running behind the stage area in a line going left to right. Below was another outer ring and so on, running down into Findon Valley. We all lived in Worthing at the time and our band did actually play there but I cannot be exactly sure which year as we played up there whenever we felt like it, acoustically or otherwise! Just having a party, you know...most weekends. When the Police moved in to ban the festival, we all moved to another nearby hill and carried on as normal ! ( The festival moved to Kitson Hill, any reports ? ) |
Steve Bayfield writes :
This was a more local event from where I was living (about 40 miles away). I arrived on site in a Ford parcel van and met up with a friend of mine in a split-screen VW van, on the Saturday afternoon. The festival site was on the southern edge of a massive iron age hill fort, and offered spectacular views over a near-by golf course, with Worthing and the south coast in the far distance (see photo of guys rapping on top of the rampart). A small stage and a good sounding PA had been set up, and nothing else - no loos or catering outlets etc. We parked up with a good view of the stage (see photo) and settled in.
