The first Glastonbury music festival began 40 years ago, when Marc Bolan arrived in a velvet-covered car and tickets cost £1 each, including free milk. From such humble beginnings on a dairy farm in Somerset the festival grew and had great weather in the early years — it was only later that Glastonbury became a byword for huge rains, flash floods and mudbaths.
The weather began to go wrong in 1982, when a cloudburst produced the first big Glastonbury washout in a sea of mud. It was said to be the highest day’s rainfall for 45 years, in what was one of the wettest Junes on record across the country. Three years later tractors were used to rescue the crowds from more flooding. “We have had the mudbath and proved we can still cope with the conditions,” said Michael Eavis, the festival’s organiser.
The problem is that this is the British monsoon season. In early summer wet weather from the Atlantic usually arrives after a fairly quiet spell over the spring, and often bursts with two or three wet spells through June.
Downpours and quagmires followed at Glastonbury in 1997, 1998 and 2000. Despite improved drainage on the site, 2005 was truly awful. After a week-long heat wave, the festival opened with a huge thunderstorm — more than a month’s worth of rain fell in a few hours and lightning struck marquees and cut power to the concert stages. A stream running through the site broke its banks and swamped the campsite, sweeping away many of the tents and leaving hundreds of others looking like upturned boats in a sea of brown water.
There was record rainfall in June 2007 and, despite improving the drainage again, Glastonbury once more turned into a quagmire. Amazingly, the festival in 2008 managed to escape the washouts of that summer, but the big downpours returned in 2009.
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Yet this year’s festival is a sellout. Even more extraordinary, it looks like being hot, sunny and dry. The biggest threats over the next few days will be dehydration and sunburn.