UPDATE 8/1/22:
Matthew Collin’s take on Kthe festival, from his brilliant Altered State:
Here is a newspaper article published on the Tuesday after the festival:
Daily Telegraph 27/7/92
Police order hippies to leave Welsh farmland
THOUSANDS of hippies who invaded Welsh farmland for an illegal weekend “festival” were ordered to leave last night, writes A J Mcllroy.
Senior police officers served notice on behalf of the owner of the hilltop site at Kerry, near Newtown, Powys, opening the way for police action to clear the site if the order is ignored. The message was broadcast by loudspeaker to the estimated 8,000 travellers from a hovering helicopter.
A Dyfed-Powys police spokesman said the hippies were asked to leave “as soon as is reasonably possible”.
He added: “We have to give preliminary notice under Section 39 of the Public Order Act and we are satisfied that has now been done.” The atmosphere was described by officers as “peaceful”.
Earlier, police confiscated two large sound systems before they could be driven on to the Kerry site and more than 70 people have so far been arrested, mainly for drug offences and for having defective vehicles. Mr Stanley Pugh, owner of Oak Farm, on whose land the new age travellers are encamped, is taking advice over a separate civil court action after packs of roaming dogs allegedly killed or mutilated 20 of his sheep.
Earlier yesterday, police and farmers set up road blocks to stop thousands more hippies joining those already encamped for the Happy Daze Free Festival. It was rumoured that 5,000 were converging on the area, including some from a “rave party” at Castle Donington, Leics.
Local landowners used tractors, earth moving equipment and bales of hay to block roads and entrances to other farms, Some sprayed fields with manure to deter trespassers.
Here’s a flyer we picked up there:
Here’s a review by an anonymous raving reporter:
Wales again- another marathon drive. Waiting around with a massive crowd of other ravers at a service station as people took it in
turns calling the info line on one payphone. Must have looked quite a sight.. Eventually found out where it was and set off. It must have been an overnight journey as I remember it being light when we got there. We saw a police roadblock ahead. There was gravel piled across the road. I remember some kind of pantomime with the cops where they couldn’t explicitly tell us not to go down the other road. So we went down the other road and found the party 
We parked up outside the fence. I think that’s when my mate took this picture:
We were quite high up, right on top of a hill, and the site was quite small and muddy compared to Lechlade, the only other festival I’d been to at this stage. There were a couple of rigs there, though apparently there had been some confiscations which dampened the mood a bit. Luckily the people who took us to the party had brought a tent. A bit of lifesaver on this occasion, we spent a lot of time there.
Somewhere on this newspaper clipping taken from the front page of the local paper is our tent and the white Fiesta ravemobile
A friend of ours had walked from his hometown, and somehow managed to find us when he arrived on site. He said that he’d thought the party was ‘just over the hill’ but it turned out to be a longer expedition than he’d expected.
Once we were all ready we swallowed some huge browny grey biscuits. They were about the size of one of those big vitamin C tablets, and they supposedly contained mescaline. I know, it sounds like sales patter, but there was definitely something special in them. Things get a bit blurry for the next few hours.
One of our friends, who was quite tall, as it goes, was scared silly because a group of 3 or 4 even taller blokes appeared out of nowhere and proceeded to dance under the low canopy suspended over the sound system, their heads bobbing up and down and making random lumps and bumps in the makeshift tent. Although this isn’t scary in itself, add a liberal helping of bass-heavy gabba with samples such as ‘there is no planet earth, there is no planet earth’ and you have a severely frightened raver who is convinced that the aliens have come.
UPDATE 08/03/09: It was this timeless banger from Claude Young:
Last time it was solded on Discogs it reached £117, but there aren’t any copies on sale right now.
Shout outs to wheezer for id’ing it
At some stage the ground turned into bouncy muddy techno foam rubber.
I saw hidden codes written in the barcode on a Ribena packet.
There were, I think, 2 rigs but I think we were only hanging about at the Spiral affiliated one. I don’t even know if it was their own rig but I remember it was little.
Thinking about the music at that party, there were two things, or rather people- that really stood out, MC Scallywag and DJ Aztek. Aztek was playing a style I’d never heard before. Still not sure what it was (any ideas?) but it was hard and fast and gabberish. Scallywag on the other hand was just making up daft rhymes about ravers not leaving their turds all over the place (good point).
At some stage day turned to night and back to day and we were back in our tent drifting in and out of consciousness. The whole cycle started again on the Monday morning.
We bumped into someone we knew from Dorset who had enlisted in the brew crew. I had a half lucid conversation with him and then when I saw him in town a few weeks later he denied he had even been at the festival.
Halfway through the festival we wandered to the gate. There were a few journalists and cameramen hanging about and being berated by some angry travellers. When we finally reached home we made some tea, sat down, and turned the TV on. The party we had just been to was on the news. Not only that but we could be seen ambling around in the background. This festival was mentioned in the media because the DHSS had actually showed up to the festival to allow people to sign on on site. And at that time I expect there was a Daily Mail/Express/some politician expressing ‘outrage’ about mediaeval brigands &c &c
On the Tuesday (???? my memory’s not infallible you know!), the music was still going and there was a police helicopter circling. Some cop was blathering away over a megaphone, some nonsense about leaving the site, er, which we did.
Not long after we left the site we saw a police checkpoint up ahead. The driver decided that maybe we had to stop (maybe he had a guilty conscience!), but we urged him to drive on.
On the way back we stopped a couple of times for food- the first time was a little old ladies’ tearoom where we felt completely out of place after spending a weekend in another dimension. The second place was one of those fucking abysmal overpriced motorway service stations. We made the most of it though. Again we felt a little out of place. The most wrecked of us all spent some time transfixed by the weird spiral shaped Cumberland sausage on his plate.
I could post a well embarrassing pic of 2 of my fellow passengers, heads right back, gobs wide open, dead to the world leaning against each other all e-sleepy in the back of the car but A) I can’t find it, and B) it would only be amusing to about 10 people 
UPDATE: Amino Clang, who walked from his hometown and spent the weekend raving with us, just sent me this account, THANKS LOADS!
This weekend all starts on the Saturday night when my Mum had decided that she would like to come along to a rave to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, our dog had “done a runner” and he didn’t get home until quite late so it was decided that we would not go to the rave tonight. I was supposed to be meeting up with some friends of mine who were going to give me a lift down to visit my Dad in Dorset and there was going to be a big bunch of my mates from Wales going too so I was not impressed with this decision but I was promised that we would go down there the next day instead. I didn’t sleep well that night. I just couldn’t wait to get there and meet up with my mates and get munted in front of a spirally sound system.
Sunday morning came and we all piled into the car to drive off to the festi. It was supposed to be in Kerry in South Wales and we lived in North Wales so we made an early start. Kerry was awash with coppers and the road up to the site was blocked. Not even my mum could persuade them to let us through, but when I explained that I had to “get up there to get a lift home” the copper in question said “I can’t just let you go through here, but if you walk around that way you might find another way though.”
I put my big backpack on my back, I had another bag in one hand (full of juggling equipment and water probably!) and I had another big bottle of water in my other hand. I said my goodbyes and off I went, on my own into the unknown!
An hour or so later I found myself on top a welsh mountain asking a group of dog-walking locals where the rave was because I needed to get there to catch my lift home. They pointed to the top of the hill on the other side of the valley and there, running across the horizon I caught my first glimpse of Happy Daze Free Festival, Kerry. With a new spring in my step I started the long walk down into the valley, through the woods and up the other side.
I-don’t-know-how-many-hours later I finally made it onto the site. Yeeeee Haw! My shoulders were killing me from carrying all my stuff, I had narrowly avoided a confrontation with a local farmer and his angry looking son, I was so fucked that a night of raving was the last thing I needed, but I had made it! Now I had to find my friends.
I did a couple of rounds of the site looking for somebody I recognised. I later discovered that all of my mates from Wales had gone home already and I guess everybody else was asleep following a hard night on the turf. Eventually I saw a car that I thought I recognised so I went closer to investigate. I was looking in the windows of the car to see if I recognised any of the stuff in it when this crusty came over. I am still not sure if he was serious or if he was checking me out but he was saying “Yea, go on mate, just smash the window and grab what you want. We could take it for a spin if you like…” etc. He wierded me out enough to walk away from the car and I was about to give up when one of my friends poked his head out of the tent next to the car and called me back. He said that he thought he had recognised my voice, but wasn’t sure. Yipeeeee! I had made it to the rave AND found my lift home – Happy Days!
Later that night our other friend (the driver) found us all some “Disco Biscuits” (they looked like somebody had drizzled chemicals into small biscuit shapes about the size of a penny and we were told that they were MDMA and mescalin, later experiments have lead me to believe that it was probably MDA – allow me to elaborate…) so we all dropped them together in the tent – the driver, his missus, two other close friends and me…
The next thing I remember is coming up like a demon had just jumped on my head and was beating my brain into submission. It was all I could do to clamp my jaw down on my wallet and scream my little head off! I was in the tent with just one of my friends (I guess the other three had gone for a stomp) and we were both beside ourselves with rushes.
A short while later the others came back into the tent (they had assumed we would be in a bit of a pickle if their state was anything to go by) and asked if we were OK – what with all the screaming and shouting and all that! We started to come round, but I asked the driver’s missus for a hug because I was so far gone (nothing funny like, just a friendly hug from a friend, please), and y’know what, it made things a bit easier. I strongly recommended my mate do the same so we all had hugs in the tent and then walked over to the Spiral Tribe Sound System for some dancing.
Dancing! Ha! Don’t make me laugh, I could barely stand up straight, never mind dance. Squishy field, wonky pills, gnarly techno, happy people. I think I went up and gave a dealer a hug at one point because she was doing such a service to society by spreading so much happiness (a view I still firmly believe – I mean, can you imagine a world where dealers didn’t provide some much needed escapism from the mundane modern world of working to pay the bills?). I also remember getting into quite a discussion with somebody who had lost their mate “Billy” and was asking if I had seen any of him – I just didn’t get it!
Later the next morning I was still awake with some other friends who I had met up with and I think we were talking with some Tribers because one of them was saying how the spiral is the best shape for a festi. “If all the vehicles,” he was saying “would park up in a big spiral with the rave in the centre, the police would never get in. You just park the last one in front of the entrance and leave them there – what could they do?”. He was not impressed with my suggestion that “It would be horrible if you were the first one here, but you had work on Monday morning though wouldn’t it?”
Well, later that day we had to start the long drive back to Dorset so we did another round of the site (stopping at the entrance, where there was now huge water containers) to fill up some bottles for the journey, and off we went.
A relatively uneventful drive home later and we were back home again (in my Dad’s place in Dorset) regaling my Dad with tales of the rave with the telly on in the background… when suddenly somebody shouted “OHMYGOD! It’s us on the news!”
We all turned to see the TV and there we were – leaning against the fence by the entrance to the festi, looking distinctly worse for wares, but right there on the national news! Funny how these things happen like that innit!
Ah, Happy Daze!