Haytor Love-in

Hippies gather in Flower Power Love-in on Dartmoor’s Haytor

A hippie love-in is staged at Haytor as the counterculturists gather in August on Dartmoor in Devon. Scott Mckenzie’s If you are going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair, becomes the hippie anthem gently emancipating a younger generation to experiment with drugs and sex. It was as much a reaction against governments and the war in Vietnam as it was against society. Slogans include Make Love Not War, Free Love and We are the Flower Children.

The Summer of Love reaches Plymouth on 25 August 1967. The artist Kenneth-Edward Swinscoe is a founder member of Peace at Will Hippie Commune in the Lee Mill area of Plymouth. Haytor is a Dartmoor honeyspot attracting tourists, climbers and abseilers. It is the backdrop to Knights of the Roundtable (1953) starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner. The quarry provided granite for the London Bridge sold to Lake Havasu City in Arizona in 1970 and hinted at in TV’s Auf Wiedersehen Pet in 2002 where the migrant labourers reconstruct Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge on a Native American Reservation in Arizona.