The Llŷn Peninsula had been a quiet stretch of farms and chapels for most of its history, the kind of place where Welsh was still the everyday language and the loudest sound on a summer evening was the surf at Porth Neigwl. Abersoch had always been an exception - a sailing village with money and a beach. By 2000 it had become a magnet for wakeboarders, and Durston spotted the opportunity. The festival grew quickly, eventually splitting across three sites: a main arena at Penrhos near Pwllheli, the wakeboard competition in Pwllheli Marina, and the Big Air Classic out in Abersoch Bay, where riders launched themselves off ramps in front of an audience standing in the sea.

What made Wakestock genuinely strange was the Pool Gap, an engineering project that did not really belong at a music festival. Two purpose-built swimming pools - 200,000 gallons of water in total - were connected by street-style metal handrails. Wakeboarders, towed by an overhead cable system, would launch out of one pool, grind along the rails like skateboarders, and splash down into the other, all while bands played a hundred yards away. It was the only attraction of its kind in Europe. Crowds would drift between the stages and the rails depending on whether a headline DJ or a particular wakeboarder was up next. The festival proudly claimed to be the foot of the Snowdonia mountains and looked out over Cardigan Bay.

The line-ups tell the story of how British festival music shifted in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Groove Armada and Pendulum and Happy Mondays headlined 2008. The Streets and Duffy and Mark Ronson came through that same year. Moby played the Open Air Stage in 2009. The 2010 weekend brought Eric Prydz, Plan B, The Ting Tings and a Calvin Harris who was three years away from becoming the most-streamed DJ on the planet. The final festival in 2014 caught Catfish and the Bottlemen, Jess Glynne, Tom Odell, Clean Bandit and Frank Turner all before they were quite famous. In 2008 Kilimanjaro Live bought half the festival; after the 2010 edition Durston handed over the rest and moved on to other projects.

In February 2015 the announcement came on Twitter: there would be no Wakestock that summer. The organisers promised the festival would return in 2016. It did not. The official statement in March 2016 was carefully ambiguous - 'it isn't necessarily the case that Wakestock will never happen again but a significant level of investment in terms of time and money will need to take place... before any commitment takes place.' That commitment never came. The festival had run for fourteen years, but the economics of mid-sized British festivals were getting brutal: insurance costs, weather risk, the bigger venues swallowing the headliners, and an audience increasingly inclined to stream from home rather than camp in a Welsh field for three days.

Drive into Abersoch on a summer afternoon now and the surf shops are still there, the wakeboarders are still on the bay, and the sailing fleet is still moored up at low tide. But the festival is gone, and with it a particular memory that thousands of British twenty-somethings will carry for the rest of their lives: the bass thudding across a field that had been pasture the week before, a wakeboarder somersaulting against the green silhouette of the Welsh mountains, the sea visible past the speakers. Wakestock turned a corner of the Llŷn Peninsula into something it had never been before - a destination for a specific kind of summer - and then handed it back to the sheep.