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Glastonbury move to Longleat “probably won’t happen”

By | Published on Tuesday 13 September 2016

Glastonbury 2016

Glastonbury Festival’s deal with the Longleat estate to act as an alternative site to Worthy Farm has apparently fallen through.

As previously reported, Michael Eavis has been saying in recent months that it’s likely that Glastonbury will have to relocate at some point in the future, due to issues surrounding the use of land from various other farms at the current site. Meanwhile, Emily Eavis has denied that there are any plans to move the main festival, but has said that there are plans to launch a new event before 2020.

Michael Eavis then said after this year’s festival that any plans to work with Longleat may be off, telling The Guardian that representatives of the estate attended this year’s Glastonbury and were “not that impressed”.

However, the estate’s own Lord Bath, so that’s Alexander Thynn, apparently remained keen. But unfortunately any hopes of reaching an agreement have now been vetoed by his son, Caewlin Thynn, who took over the running of Longleat Enterprises in 2010.

“Longleat probably won’t happen anymore”, Michael Eavis told The Telegraph. “Lord Bath is really keen. I went to him because I knew him when he was a boy. But he and his son aren’t agreeing, and they don’t speak very much, so it’s hard to make decisions. I haven’t been able to sit down with all of them at the same time”.

“Ceawlin and [his wife] Emma don’t like the mud”, he continued. “They saw the mud at its worst. They were supposed to come and see it all cleaned up on 1 Sep, but they didn’t turn up. They let me down gently about their decision. I went round to their house and we had a very long discussion. They said to clean up all that mud, they’d have to restrict the whole of the operations at Longleat for about three months and it’s too expensive”.

Eavis has previously hinted that there are other possible sites for a new festival, although Longleat was his preferred location. Though don’t be thinking that this new festival might launch in place of Glastonbury itself during it’s next year off – now confirmed as 2018 – because “there are no plans to hold an event at another location in 2018”, says the festival in a statement.



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