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There is one part of the Battle of the Beanfield I will remember to my grave. The police were attempting to arrest a young woman sitting at the front of a coach. Other coaches were being brought to a halt by the police tactics of hurling anything they could get their hands on - shields, truncheon, rocks, at least one small steel fire extinguisher - at the windscreens as they drove past.
As this one went past, the woman stood up for all to see and held up a tiny baby.
No sooner had she finished crying out that she had a baby with her, then one of the police man at the back of the melee slung a large stone at the front of that windscreen, which shattered into a thousand pieces, covering mother and baby.
He presumably had not heard or seen what we all had.
My own daughter had been born just a couple of months earlier and it was many years later before I could tell that story without having to stop half way through.
In the end, myself and my neighbour, John Moore, ended up being the only witnesses who were in the Beanfield for the whole event, but were not involved in the battle.
We went down on our motorcycles as I had inadvertently become involved the night before when part of the convoy broke in and illegally camped at my estate in Savernake Forest.
We were tagging along with the convoy near the A303 when, in a narrow little lane, the front vehicle stopped at a police barricade.
And though we were close to the front, we did not know this at the time, the back of the convoy had also been blocked off simultaneously, so this very long line of vehicles and 350 or so occupants were now effectively trapped . . .
AFTER a long impasse, the leading vehicle suddenly started its engine . . . and drove straight through the hedge into a field of beans beyond. It was immediately followed by others.
At that the police came rushing out from behind their barricades.
John and I were still wearing our motorcycle helmets, and, trying very hard not to look like members of the convoy, we unzipped our motorcycle jackets, revealing a collar and tie underneath.
We watched as the police ran along the line of vehicles. Clutching truncheons and riot shields, they ran round to the driver's door of each vehicle, repeatedly slamming their truncheons into the bodywork to make a deafening noise, and shouting at every driver: "Get out! Get out!
Hand over your keys! Get out!" That had the desired effect on some drivers, but any driver who took more that a few second to comply immediately had their windscreens smashed.
Right in front of where John and I were standing anonymously, there was a converted ambulance, with a lone blonde girl of about 20 at the wheel. A policeman ran round to her large ambulance windscreen and smashed twice at it with his truncheon. To his amazement and horror, he found those windscreens are made of specially toughened material and his heavy blows just bounced off.
At that point one of his colleagues went round to the side window and with a couple of blows managed to shatter that glass.
HE then reached inside, and was able to grab a handful of this young girl's long blonde hair. He started to try and pull her out of that broken window, over the shattered glass.
As he pulled her hair, some of his colleagues who had got into the ambulance through the rear door had grabbed some other part of this young woman.
There were then 10 ghastly seconds when she was the "rope" in some gruesome tug-of-war.
Then came a stand-off, which lasted several hours, with the police massed on the road, and the convoy camped out in the field.
The drivers would occasionally hurl insults at the police and, as the afternoon wore on, this changed into stones, and some sticks and branches. . .
In late afternoon the police finally decided the time was right to break the stalemate. Several hundred police in full riot gear rushed into the field, which on a warm summer's afternoon in the English countryside was an astonishing sight.
The convoy members naturally panicked at this, and ran back to their vehicles, starting them up and shutting the doors.
The more of a runaround that a driver had given the police, who were on foot, the grimmer his fate when he was arrested. Many were quite severely knocked about.
This was when I saw the windscreen get shattered over the mother and baby.
I also saw another horrifying incident - when a policeman used his truncheon to hit a woman who must have been eight months pregnant.
IJUST hope that, because he approached her from behind, he genuinely didn't realise her condition.
After the battle - the biggest single mass arrest of civilians anywhere in Great Britain in the 20th century - some of the vehicles that escaped destruction at Cholderton, near Salisbury, returned to Saver nake.
A number of vehicles, including some coaches, particularly those with women and children aboard, had stayed behind in the Forest that d ay.
The stragglers from the Beanfield were obviously keen to get back to the Forest to be reunited with those women, and on that Saturday night the police made no attempt to prevent that.
Next morning the police told me they wished to "finish unfinished business". I will never forget that phrase. I asked them what they meant by that and they said it was their intention to send the riot police into that campsite - predominately full of women, most of the men having been arrested the day before - and to arrest every single one.
Having seen the police excesses the day before in the Beanfield, I told them I was in no tearing hurry to see that repeated, this Sunday morning, on my property.
But what I do know is that in that instant the entire myth of the "hippy-loving" earl was born.
To the Left this Wiltshire Earl - this pillar of the landowning establishment, this secretary of Marlborough Conservatives - suddenly became a hero.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that to the Right I became an instant class traitor, because I was saying unfortunate things about our gallant boys in blue.
After that my paths crossed with the members of the convoy only in Wiltshire courts when I spent many weeks - as a witness - and eventually all the trials were abandoned.
But yes, I was shocked that day to see some police officers - many with their ID numbers covered up - arresting women with every bit as much as force as they arrested men. I am not sorry that I protested that, in my little world, that is wrong.
The Battle of the Beanfield, edited by Andy Worthington, £12.95, from Enabler Publications, Teignmouth. Tel: 01626 773145
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