The Stonehenge Free Festival was an annual, largely unofficial gathering of hippies, New Age Travellers and countercultural musicians held near Stonehenge from the mid-1970s, born out of the era's post-Woodstock free-festival movement. It mattered as both a symbol of grassroots resistance to authority and the monarchy, and as a recurring flashpoint between festival-goers and the British state, foreshadowing the more violent clashes that would later curtail such gatherings.

The festival was founded in 1974 by counter-culture figure Wally Hope, who wanted to "reclaim" the ancient site for ordinary people, and grew after a heavy-handed police crackdown on a similar event at Windsor that same year pushed attendees towards Stonehenge. Hope set up a squatting community of around 50 people, the "Wallies of Wessex", near the site, before dying in mysterious circumstances in 1975. By 1976, when Hawkwind headlined and a young Phil Daniels played guitar with the band Renoir, the event featured chaotic, poorly organised multiple stages, rampant drug use and nudity, though contemporary press coverage still largely treated it as an eccentric curiosity rather than a serious threat.