About the travelling people of Britain: gypsies - tinkers - nomads - potters
by Philip Donnellan
The wanderers of our roads and lanes talk about their lives, their homes, their work, and their problem - us
Commentary by John Seymour

They left India 900 years ago and after travelling through Asia and Europe came to England about 1400. They were a dark, mysterious, clannish folk devoted to horses. They came to be called Egyptians - or gypsies for short.
The law saw them as a threat to order and stability - and still does apparently.
Today, existence is more difficult than ever for the travelling family, hate and misunderstanding more widespread. While the Irish tinkers slug it out with Authority in the city centres, the English gypsies try to keep to their 'underground' life.
Independence has always been their pride. Individualism has served them for centuries as a way of life. Can it survive? Where do they go from here?
In this film we meet half a dozen families at the berry-picking in Perthshire or a squalid Kentish campsite; at a wedding in Evesham; a Yorkshire horse-fair and scraphunting on the Welsh border.
The rise and fall of the leaf: page 6