HORSEFAIRS I Wickham Horse Fair. Wickham, Hampshire, England

Walking down the country lane that leads to Wickham Horse Fair there is a fantastic sense of energy and anticipation that you get from any large gathering of people. The road is lined with empty horse boxes and the smell of leather and animals hangs heavily in the air. Wickham is a small tidy conventional village in Hampshire but for the last 751 years (!) it’s had a horse fair every year on the 20th May. Horses were once a much more integral part of our urban life, let alone country life. With the rise of the combustion engine they have been gradually sidelined and used more for leisure pursuits but horse fairs were once a common part of the country year, like the equivalent of the London Motor Show.

Wickham is predominantly a key event for the Romany and Traveller communities and whilst horses are the focus, the fair provides an essential opportunity to meet with family and friends and to celebrate and locate the culture of those groups. If you aren’t from those backgrounds you get a strong awareness of being an outsider that should keep their head down but this is the richness of life in Britain, without these groups we would be so much the poorer however hard co-existing can sometimes be. If you want to know more get hold of a copy of Damian Le Bas’s book “The Stopping Places” here. It’s a wonderful description of the complexities of being an insider and an outsider. As he says in a recent Guardian article ‘It’s not the travel that’s the problem, it’s the stopping’.