Now and then, in summer, on one of Norfolk's ancient commons, you might see a Gypsy waggon, small, colourful and anachronistic. A tethered horse nearby will be reducing the grass in its orbit to trampled paleness, while a dog looks out from between the wagon's wheels.

Nearby will be the fire with cooking irons - a simple frame and suspended pot - and, by the waggon's steps, the polished brass wash stand and water jacks.

And the chances are that the people whose travelling summer home this is are not city drop-outs nor New Age Travellers who have forsaken the clapped out bus for a Gypsy vardo in a bid for greater cred but will still leave rubbish all over the place.

In Norfolk, they will probably be John Leveridge and family travelling for the summer in the old Romany way, in tune with the countryside, leaving nothing behind.

For John is true Romany and he is travelling Norfolk as his father and grandfather did before him, stopping at the same places, defending the heritage against the erosion of time for he is, he thinks, the last in the county to do so.

And yet John's is just a local action in defence of a worldwide culture which goes back at least to the ninth century when Romanies are thought to have emerged from India. They spread westwards to Europe, persecuted all the way because, as travellers, they were always outsiders. In England, by Henry VIII's time, it was a capital offence to be a Gypsy. Hitler murdered 600,000 of them.

Today there are big communities in many countries, especially in Eastern Europe where many have been forcibly ghettoed; nothing much changes, in essence if not degree.

But, in a culture where written history is thin, John's family can still trace its line back through the heyday of the vardo, the gypsy waggon which remains the most potently romantic symbol of life on the road.

These colourful, though sometimes less than robust, vehicles first appeared only in the mid 19th century when Telford and Macadam had made roads sufficiently passable. And yet already by the early 20th century, they were being usurped by the motor car and, with many travellers turning to a settled life, their numbers dwindled. By the 1970, only six per cent of UK gypsies were thought to use them.

Even so, that relatively brief spell of mostly Victorian creativity spawned half a dozen main types of waggon, each with many variations, suited to the profession of the various travellers - the brush makers, the showmen, the dentists, the general dealers - and the last of them, developed between the wars and known as the Open Lot, is still occasionally built today. John's present vardo is an Open Lot, and he has built a few himself over the years.

He doesn't spend all year on the road; he has a house near Norwich and even when he is travelling, he has work to attend to and so the car comes too.

But his great grandfather, a Norfolk man, was travelling full time in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire around the turn of the century, and his grandfather started coming back to Norfolk with his wife and son - John's father - in 1922, pitching on commons such as Hanworth and Roughton, and visiting the Alborough Festival.

'My Dad was only seven then' says John. 'And the family travelled full time until Grandad had a bungalow built in north Norfolk. But even then, they still went travelling in summer.'

The pattern was broken for John's father when he went into the Army, serving for eight years with the Royal Norfolk Regiment and fighting in Burma. But travelling remained in the blood.

'When he came out, he and Mother - she was from the Kidds family, well-known general dealers - went back on the road, travelling in Leicestershire and Northants again although Grandfather stayed in Norfolk.'

Nowadays, John and Janet's summer tour tends to stay in north Norfolk where they have family and can visit Aldborough Festival as Grandfather did, and, also these days, the Worstead Festival.

But the tour is not always easy. Although the horse can pull 25 miles a day that has sometimes to be short circuited, quite simply because of public hostility born mainly of confusion with New Age Travellers.

'Around Norwich it's particularly bad. We get bricks thrown at us. People try to spook the horse, revving motorbikes, throwing beer cans. We get spat at, shouted at, all sorts of abuse gets thrown at us. Even at home, we've had flares fired at the waggons in the drive. Ninety per cent of people are okay but ten per cent just want trouble. But we don't leave rubbish lying around. We don't leave anything behind. The first thing that gets put up when we stop is the toilet. But you can't talk to those people. So, when we set out these days, I put the waggon on the low loader and box the horse until we are well clear of Norwich.'

And if that all seems a bit contrived - boxing the horse, putting the waggon on the low loader, having the car brought along so that he can still go to work - it amounts to an act of faith to maintain a visible element of traditional Romany life which has long been under physical assault and is now in danger of being immersed in the accelerating indifference of the 'now' mentality.

Gypsy waggons and Romany culture, after all, are not castles or scheduled ancient monuments fixed in the landscape and protected by law for future generations to appreciate.

There is an excellent museum of Romany life near Spalding in Lincolnshire but the public celebration of the life, its language and all its traditions is confined mainly to annual horse fairs, especially that at Appleby in Cumbria in early June where thousands of Gypsies from across the UK and beyond descend on a small market town. There, down by the river in the town centre and on the lanes and fields of the surrounding countryside, small groups of men stand doing horse deals watched by bigger groups of onlookers, while the subjects of those deals, rigged in pacing sulkies - carts - career past at dangerous velocities or stand around nibbling grass.

There are other horse fairs, at Stow-on-the-Wold at Gloucestershire and even here in Norfolk at Watton in May where the culture flickers on. But for his part, John continues to travel each summer in the face of brickbats, abuse and general ignorance in the hope that it will spread a little more understanding and appreciation of what is anyway a piece of English heritage.

Contact:
Romany Museum, Spalding, Lincs 01775 710599
www.boswell-romany-museum.com

Reproduced by kind permission of John Worrall © 2002