Carrying pop fans at 10 shillings (50p) a time, Southern Vectis double-deckers growled across the island along the rock superhighway, aka the B3399 Pleasingly, the same vehicles are still plying the route. "Open the gates, and for God's sake let's have some music."It could not happen now: Desolation Row is occupied by the Freshwater Bay Golf Club.Those of us who were still only just coming to terms with adolescence had obediently bought our tickets in advance, and hung on tightly to the precious multicoloured entitlement to 120 hours of latrine-to-Release- tent entertainment. One in every 100 of the people of Britain, plus tens of thousands of foreign visitors, found a way to the island of rock dreams.The old steamers that used to splutter across from Portsmouth to Ryde have since been replaced by Australian-built catamarans. These carve across the Solent in 15 minutes flat, but moor at the same doddery old pier. Here is a rusting iron and timber pier being used precisely for its original purpose - a terminal for transportation by sea. The only amusements are the quaint old railway station, with a few peeling traces of the old yellow-and-green Southern Region paint job, and the trains - quainter yet - that rattle across the ironwork to meet the day-trippers.

When old London Underground trains have finished shuttling between Morden and Edgware, they get floated over to the Isle of Wight, where they are repainted and pressed into service on the modest railway to Shanklin. From their base on the slope, these rebels without a ticket launched a series of guerrilla raids, culminating in the fences being torn down and the festival being declared free."This festival cannot ever break even, so we're going to make it free as from this minute." Rikki Farr was the de facto compere, and spent much of the time sermonising on stage. They comprised a loose coalition of French anarchists, White Panthers and, bizarrely, Young Liberals. Prosaically, this hill was known as Desolation Row (or Devastation Hill) during the festival, an escarpment inhabited by those unable or unwilling to pay the pounds 3 demanded for five days of rock. Poetically, the Tennyson Trail stretches along the spine of East Afton Down, extending eastwards from the monument to the poet in Freshwater Bay.

(Anyone who was not there will argue that Live Aid had a much better line-up in 1985 and wonder what all the fuss was about.)Those who missed the gig should just enjoy the surroundings. You instantly recall how the ragged plain - its coarse, cropped grass spattered with cowpats - gained an extra dimension and came to life with the best rock billing ever. One summer later, Jonathan Glancey (see below) and I landed on the Isle of Wight. A ticket to Ryde (calling at Ford, Barnham and Bognor Regis) took you to a close approximation of Abroad, and placed you a few hundred feet from your rock idols.Anyone who was there can, these days, clamber across a stile to heaven.

In the summer of 1969, Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon and half a million people congregated at Woodstock for the first mega-festival. The occasional neat village conforms to either or both of the island's twin traditions: red-brick homes with sharply raked roofs, or older, greyer and comfortably thatched stone cottages.You can also see that the only possible venue for the pop festival was this huge field, a mile long and a quarter-mile broad. For the tourist, this corner of the island is a quiet treasure, a Greatest Hits of the landscapes of Wessex. You can see for miles and miles from the highest ridge of East Afton Down, across the rolling pastures of West Wight to the sunlight dancing on the silvery Solent, pierced by trim sails and edged by a dusting of chalk-white cliffs frozen like waves against the horizon Few signs of human habitation impinge upon this vision. Afton Farm basks serenely in the August sun, devoid of any creature more offensive than a couple of dozen heifers wandering around and looking as if they might be auditioning for the cover shot of the Atom Heart Mother album. Clad in a tie-dye shirt and green loon pants, I cannot possibly be a tourist Last Sunday I was, though. A quarter-century on from the third, last and greatest Isle of Wight pop festival, the field stretches emptily into the distance.