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June in Somerset has a particular rhythm. Weeks before the summer solstice, the roads around Pilton start to fill up. Campervans queue through Shepton Mallet. Fields that have spent the year quietly doing what fields do suddenly become one of the most watched pieces of land on earth. But not this year. In 2026, Worthy Farm stays true to itself, a farm.
For the first time in nearly a decade of planned intent: no pandemic panic, no permit crisis, no bad luck. Glastonbury Festival is sitting one out. A fallow year so they say. And if you want to understand what that really means, you have to start with the cows. Moo.
The Land Comes First
Worthy Farm is not a festival venue that happens to have cows on it. It is a working dairy operation of roughly 900 acres that happens to host the world’s greatest music festival once a year. Around 400 Holstein cattle live there year-round, producing milk that feeds into local produce including the farm’s own Worthy Farm Reserve Cheddar in collaboration with Somerset’s Wyke Farms. When more than 200,000 people descend every June, those cows are moved to other parts of the landholding, the pasture gets compressed into mud or baked into dust, and then the gates close and the land tries to remember what it’s supposed to be.
After five or six years of that cycle, the land needs more than a few months to get back to its best. It needs a whole year.
The fallow year is a concept borrowed directly from agriculture, the practice of resting a field for a full season so the soil can recover its structure and nutrients. Michael Eavis did not just borrow the idea philosophically; he invented Glastonbury’s version of it in the late 1980s, and he has said so with the particular candour you only get from someone who has been running the same event for half a century.
“I invented those in the eighties,” he told The Glastonbury Free Press during last year’s festival, “because it was very stressful with the licence, the police, the village, the press and the council. I thought, ‘We’ll give them all a break so they’ve got nothing to complain about for a bit!’ And of course, the farm gets a rest. It was a really good idea.”
It is worth sitting with that for a moment. The fallow year, now treated by festival culture with a kind of reverent mystique, began partly as a peace offering to annoyed locals and a stretched licensing authority. That is not a criticism of Eavis. It is a reminder of how pragmatic and human the whole thing has always been underneath its mythology. Glastonbury has never been quite as cosmic as its reputation suggests. It has always been, at its core, a farm yard.
Eight Years in the Making
The last planned fallow year was 2018. What followed has been anything but normal. The 2020 and 2021 editions were cancelled by COVID-19 (enforced absences rather than chosen ones, which carry a very different weight). When the festival came back in 2022 it did so with an energy that felt almost feverish, Billie Eilish headlining the Pyramid Stage at 20 years old, Paul McCartney at 80 doing the same. The years since have been relentless and, at times, extraordinary to say the least.
So 2026 is the first time in eight years that the break is deliberate and probably much needed. Emily Eavis, who now runs the festival day-to-day while her father Michael, who turned 90 in October 2025, steps further into a founding patriarch role, has been clear about why it matters. “The fallow year is important because it gives the land a rest, it gives the cows a chance to be out for longer and reclaim their land,” she has said. “Sustainability and the need to live in harmony with the land has always been vital to Glastonbury Festival.”
That framing is not corporate greenwashing. The plans for 2026 back it up. Speaking on the BBC’s Sidetracked podcast, Emily Eavis was notably animated about what the year off actually looks like on the ground.
“We’re planting 30,000 trees next year. I’m really excited about it. We bought some land on the outside of the site and we’re going to do a big planting project. It’s the kind of thing you want to do on a fallow year Plant trees, plant hedges and really restore the wild side of the surrounding land.”
Thirty thousand trees. That is not a token gesture. That is a landscape being actively remade during the silence, and it points to something the fallow year has historically represented beyond mere rest. It is Glastonbury’s creative recharge. The Park stage, now one of the festival’s most beloved areas, arrived in 2007 after the 2006 break. Block9’s infamous NYC Downlow came the same year.
After the 2012 fallow, 2013 saw a transformed Pyramid Stage and a new premium camping area. After 2018, the 2019 edition brought Arcadia’s Pangea, a 140-tonne dock crane converted into a colossal sound and fire installation,and Block9 doubling in size. Arcadia’s co-founder Pip Rush acknowledged it directly: “The fact that last year was a fallow year for Glastonbury gave us an opportunity to work on a much bigger project.”
What 2027 brings on top of 30,000 new trees is a question worth watching closely.
What 2025 Left Behind (Glastonbury 2026)
Glastonbury 2025 had the particular energy of a year that knew it was the last one for a while. Emily Eavis has said that the festival before a fallow year is always…
“a fun one to plan, because you almost have to fit two years into one.”
And that showed.
The Pyramid Stage headliners were The 1975 on Friday, Neil Young on Saturday and Olivia Rodrigo on Sunday. Young’s presence alone was a saga: in January 2025 he announced he would not play, citing concerns about the festival’s relationship with the BBC and declaring it “now under corporate control,” before reversing course two days later and blaming a communication error. Whether that was a genuine misunderstanding or a moment of very public negotiating theatre, it set the tone for a year in which Glastonbury seemed to generate headlines before it even began.
The secret sets were the real talking points for anyone who was there. Lorde opened Friday with a surprise 11:30am performance on the Woodsies stage, playing her new album in full to a crowd so large that security eventually had to close access points. Lewis Capaldi made an emotional return to the Pyramid in a deliberately mysterious billing, his first Glastonbury appearance since his difficult 2023 set where the crowd sang him through his own songs as he struggled on stage.
It was one of the genuinely moving things the festival has produced in recent memory. Pulp surfaced as the Saturday mystery booking, Jarvis Cocker noting they had first played some of those songs at Glastonbury thirty years and four days earlier.
Olivia Rodrigo closed the festival on Sunday to the warmest critical reception of the weekend. The Guardian gave her set five stars, helped significantly by a guest appearance from Robert Smith of The Cure, who came on to duet for two songs. Rodrigo introduced him as “perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England.” It was the kind of Glastonbury moment that gets talked about for years.
Rod Stewart took the Sunday teatime Legends slot in a pink suit, brought out Ronnie Wood, and had the good sense to know that a crowd who came to see Rod Stewart at Glastonbury want exactly what Rod Stewart at Glastonbury delivers.
But 2025 will not be remembered purely for music. Bob Vylan, a punk-rap duo, led their West Holts set into territory that generated an international response. Chants during a BBC iPlayer-streamed performance led to condemnation from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, an apology from the BBC, a criminal investigation from UK police, and the revocation of the band’s US visas. The festival’s own position was pointed: “Very much crossed a line,” said organisers.
Emily Eavis stated there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence, while acknowledging that with nearly 4,000 performances across the weekend, the festival cannot be responsible for every individual sentiment expressed on its stages. Irish-language rap trio Kneecap also played a set the BBC chose not to stream live, a decision that pushed an estimated two million viewers toward a fan’s TikTok instead.
The political storm around 2025 raises questions the festival will carry into 2027. How much editorial control is possible. Is it desirable at an event that has always prided itself on being a space where artists speak freely? That is not a question with an easy answer, and Glastonbury has never been particularly comfortable with easy answers.
The Quiet Succession Story
Underneath the fallow year, there is a family story that deserves more attention than it tends to get. In October 2024, Michael Eavis transferred his financial shares in the festival company to Emily and a family trust. The timing was widely linked to incoming changes in UK inheritance tax rules for family businesses. The practical reality is that what Michael built over five decades is now formally in Emily’s hands.
Michael was characteristically gracious about it at the 2025 festival, where he appeared on the Pyramid Stage during Rod Stewart’s Legends set in a wheelchair, accompanied by his daughter. “Emily is doing so well,” he said. “I’m just feeling really safe with the show being in her hands.” He turned 90 that October. He has been involved with Worthy Farm his entire adult life.
The 2026 fallow year is, in a quiet way, also the beginning of what Glastonbury looks like under sole Eavis stewardship for the first time. Emily has spoken about already having acts booked as far as 2028, which suggests the planning machine never really stops even when the festival does.
What Comes Next For Glasto
Glastonbury 2027 will take place from Wednesday 23 June to Sunday 27 June. General tickets are not yet on sale, and the pattern suggests a deposit-based sale in November 2026, with any unsold or returned tickets going back out the following April. Registration is free and open now through the official See Tickets system; it is mandatory before any ticket purchase, and closing your registration off or failing to update a photo in time has caught out experienced festivalgoers before. The 2025 ticket price was £378.50. Expect that to be higher in 2027.
The festival has already begun building momentum in its absence. A charity prize draw for the first 25 pairs of 2027 tickets, run as a Crowdfunder in November 2025, raised emergency funds for Médecins Sans Frontières for its work in Gaza and Sudan. It cleared its target comfortably. Glastonbury has donated to MSF multiple times in recent years and the relationship appears to be ongoing, with Olivia Rodrigo’s 2025 Pyramid performance subsequently released as a live album with proceeds going to the same organisation.
As for who plays the Pyramid in 2027. The bookmakers opened their markets within 24 hours of the 2025 festival ending, which says everything about how seriously those markets should be taken. Sam Fender has appeared as favourite with William Hill at 2/1. Oasis, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Chappell Roan, Little Simz and Fred Again have all been named. Taylor Swift is a genuinely interesting case: she was booked to headline the cancelled 2020 50th anniversary edition and has never played. That particular piece of unfinished business has been sitting there for six years.
No acts are confirmed. None will be confirmed publicly until Emily Eavis is ready. The rumour cycle is part of the fallow year ritual, and everyone who participates in it knows it.
The Value of Silence
Stepping back from it all, Glastonbury’s willingness to stop is precisely what makes its returns feel like events. Most festivals, most enterprises of any kind, are terrified of the gap. The gap looks like lost revenue, lost relevance, lost momentum. Glastonbury treats the gap as a feature rather than a fault, and has done so repeatedly enough that it now functions almost as a promise: we will rest, and we will come back better.
The 30,000 trees being planted in the Somerset earth this year will still be growing when people who are children now are in their thirties. Some of them will have stood through dozens of future Glastonburys by then, and most of those people will never know they were planted in the quiet year. That might be the most Glastonbury thing about the whole arrangement. The biggest act of the fallow year is one nobody will ever see.
The fields go quiet. The cows come home. And somewhere, already, Emily Eavis is on the phone to a headline act for 2027.
He discovered the gem when he was 12 years old and still has it now, claiming it to be why he fell in love with music. He likes to play disc golf when he's not writing about music. He is a one-of-a-kind individual who is always the first to bust out his air guitar on the dance-floor.
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