Building Castles

Crews have been building the Glastonbury Festival site for months ready for it to open on Wednesday so that punters can pitch their tents in time for the festival start on Thursday. But our little team of 16 (11 teachers, 2 cooks and 3 co-ordinators/fixers) were setting up from midday today.

When I was trying to decide before I came what music I wanted to hear, it dawned on me that with over 100 stages and countless bars also with live music, Glasto is like no festival I've been to before and I decided that rather than pursuing music I wanted to hear I'd treat it like visiting a new city, wandering round and stopping when something interested me. 

I wanted to get the lie of the land before it got really busy, so I hitched from Glastonbury town soon after breakfast. As I expected, I was picked up by kind people going to the site. Better than that, they'd been yesterday, so we got in fairly quickly and they drove me almost to the Kidz Field, saving me a 35-minute walk from the gate - the site really is vast.

I collected my wristband and went walking. In three days' time, this space will be full, full, full of jostling legs and feet. But today, when the roads and tracks were heavy with vehicles that had come to set up, and all the spaces either side were open-air workshops with yellow-tabarded people building things, my two feet were a liability. I was in humble respect of the huge amount of work going on around me to create this temporary city and tried to keep out of the way as I explored its skeleton. This picture is of a part-built dry-stone wall/seat next to the climbing castle.

I'd walked about six miles by the time the rest of my team arrived, including Ben with my baggage. We started marking out our little bit of the field with our tents, carting pots, pans and stoves to set up our camp kitchen, and collecting all the instruments from a nearby field and getting them into the music tent. Another couple of miles to and fro.

Ben drove me back to Glastonbury town with Firstborn, where I was pleased to be able to make them a cup of tea before their drive back to Bristol - we'd been that deprived all day!