When I was a callow music-mad youth, summer revolved around a circuit of music festivals.

It still does.

As a young festival-goer, with a dodgy haircut, faded denim jacket and a pocketful of guarana capsules from the herbal remedy aisle of my local Boots, I’d catch a bus to the nearest motorway junction, scribble the words ‘South please’ on a piece of cardboard and stick out my thumb.

Sometimes I took a tent and sleeping bag, other times just the clothes I stood up in. Money didn’t come into it.

Most festivals were free then, the only cash needed being for a couple of beers and the odd egg sandwich. I’d see the same faces at gatherings from Salisbury Plain to the Yorkshire Dales – the whole circuit (a crustier version of the toffs’ ‘season’ but with Stonehenge and Ribblehead taking the place of Henley and Badminton) followed by what was known as the Peace Convoy – essentially a raggle-taggle collection of converted buses and horse boxes manned by cheerful folk, sporting matted dreadlocks and tie-dye and clutching lean dogs on strings.

It’s a bit different these days.

I write this column from Wilderness festival – a gathering of 30,000 people in the genteel surroundings of Cornbury Park. It’s lovely, and almost as friendly as festivals used to be, though instead of a gaggle of new age travellers and ravers there are tens of thousands of shiny, beautiful people – radiating health and, beneath the weekend-hippy window dressing, affluence – because, essentially, it has been a long time since festivals have been free.

This is not some nostalgic diatribe, however. Wilderness may cost the best part of £150 (and that’s a good £50 quid cheaper than many lesser festivals) but it’s gorgeous; a little slice of rural utopia – complete with real craftspeople turning wood and firing pots, professional actors leaping around among the trees and some of the hippest musicians on the circuit – which, at Wilderness included ‘king of lounge’ Burt Bacharach.

Okay, it costs £12 for a lobster roll rather than a quid for an egg butty, but – hey, it’s a holiday isn’t it, and you couldn’t say that about the gruelling festivals of old. And I’ll wager no one at Wilderness had their cars set on fire by bikers – which is an improvement on at least one of the festivals I still shudder at the memory of.

Cropredy, which also took place over the weekend, is similar. While not as freewheeling as Wilderness (the music is turned off well before midnight, and after-hours activity is confined to lightly strummed guitars rather than masked balls in the woods), it also serves the same purpose – of taking people out of their day-to-day existence for a weekend of al fresco fun in a field.

And while I do miss the hedonistic festivals of old, I have to admit that these days I’m much happier watching an easy-listening legend while munching a lobster sandwich.

Here’s to festival-going.

Oxford Mail:

email: thughes@oxfordmail.co.uk