And both in tune, like two gypsies on a horse. (As You Like It., Act V Sc.iii) The daughters were ready to learn to ride and my wife, an Old Thelwellian, imagined them following in her gymkhana’d footsteps. Unfortunately the horse we bought, called Coffee, had a personality defect and became quite ungovernable when asked to do the simple things in life, like walk up and dow n. Little daughters were thrown in pain and tears, out-of-practice wife lost her nerve, and Coffee had to go - but first, Coffee had to become the virtuous girl we had believed her to be. We called in a friend, a man who trades horses, trains horses, knows all about horses. He is, of course, a gypsy. He was puzzled by Coffee at first and then realised what was the matter. Her previous owner, our gypsy friend deduced, had jumped her and jumped her, at shows and in the home paddock, so much so that Coffee could not understand that there was any other sort of riding. She was always wanting to be off, turning, twisting, accelerating, forever looking for the next jump.

Well, we don’t know what our friend did but within two weeks a completely docile and governable Coffee, nice as pie with the smallest child, was sold to someone down south for twice what we had paid for her.

A few months after that, I saw my gypsy friend go very carefully into a stable where he had a black workhorse which, I noted, had an extremely wild eye. It was a big beast, a war horse, warrior enough to turn any tiger, and I would not have gone in with it (except to rescue the tiger).

A couple of weeks later, this same horse could have served tea at the Queen’s garden party. Again, I don’t know what was done, except it involved a three-ton harrow normally pulled by the most powerful Massey Ferguson but, whatever it was, it worked. I know that gypsies, like most horse-masters, do not mess about.

What gypsies do to horses is always a topic around Appleby New Fair, established 1685 and held for a week in early June. A few soft-centred locals write to the paper saying gypsy methods are cruel. The RSPCA comes to the Fair with a specialist equine vet but we don’t know what their view is, since they did not respond to our request for it. National newspapers tend to publish articles which ignore what actually happens and instead view the Fair as a folk-museum tableau. The Independent did it two years ago. See the funny gypsies in their time-honoured caravans, roasting their ancestral hedgehogs and telling fortunes. Two years ago, actually, a gypsy boy drove a horse harnessed to a cart into the river. He went into a dub (deep hole), the cart went down and the horse was drowned.

Whatever anyone?s opinion, the fact is that Appleby Fair, at over 300 years of age, is more popular than ever. It attracts around 6,000 travelling people plus another 10,000 visitors who come to look at the 6,000 and their horses. Until the 19th century?s growth explosion in towns and shops, such fairs were an integral part of normal life. We used to need them once or twice a year, so we could buy what we couldn't?t get ordinarily in the market square.

In rural England right up to the early 1950s, that need included a horse or two. Now there are only a few of the old-style fairs left and Appleby is the biggest. Quite why Appleby was selected to represent history is a matter for debate, but there is no doubt that it was the gypsies who did the selecting. Appleby New Fair lives on because of its horseman gypsies. Nottingham Goose Fair (for example), a honky-tonk collection of mechanical garishness, lives by its showmen gypsies. The traditional Fair’s purpose for the travelling people was always horse business, lengthily and subtly conducted, and meeting old friends, and making betrothals and other family arrangements for the future, and celebrating the fact of being a gypsy.

Probably the years from about 1800 to 1950 were the best years for gypsies in Britain. There were many, many little local difficulties and almost universal prejudice and disdain, but the horse-drawn, travelling way of life was feasible and it gradually acquired a kind of standard pattern and a ro mantic patina. Gypsies could offer the rest of society certain useful and marketable products and services. The greatest of these was horses and everything to do with horses: buying, selling, breaking, training, doctoring, shoeing, harness mending and making, carts likewise, riding lessons, grooming and stable work. In a world driven by horses the gypsy was a much needed person, if not always properly valued and respected.

As ever there has to be a down side, and gypsy skills at faking and disguising horses for sale were as highly developed and as famous as their abilities to make a bad tempered horse good and a lazy horse lively. (Horse faking, incidentally, has its own word: to feague, from the German fegen, to polish). Fairs, which were all horse fairs, died if they were deserted by their gypsies. One such used to be among the greatest fairs in the north of England, only six miles from Appleby, near Brough. Brough Hill Fair was "to the Cumbrian woman, all that is bad in human conduct as well as in weather." Brough itself from ancient days was a crossroads town on the trans-Pennine route; in Victorian mining and railway times it had a roaring reputation.

Today it is a quiet village, A66 by-passed, where you can go on a sunny week-day and imagine tumbleweed blowing down the empty street. Now, Brough Hill is part of an army firing range. The Fair is a vestigial jolly afternoon with market stalls and Morris dancers in the village. When autumn blows chill and rains torrents, people still say "It’s Brough Hill weather!" and that’s all that’s left of the Fair, a saying in the wind. Brough Hill Fair was established by Edward III’s Charter in 1331 - that’s just after Robert the Bruce and just before the first Ming Emperor. It was two days, the last of September and the first of October, and it was a show which ran and ran.

Around 1900, the Lake District author A. Wren Rumney paid it a visit, and here is the journalistic description from his wonderful book The Dalesman. "Several of the prospective buyers had their saddles and bridles with them, to come in useful should they make a purchase, but the majority were content with the bridle only and prepared to return bare-backed.....Now the ponies are in clusters, all with their heads to the centre. When a spectator signifies his desire to see one in particular, the owner gives a rough order to his drover, who dashes at the indicated animal, pulls it out by the tail, and runs it down a narrow alley in the crowd, grasping its mane. Sometimes the terrified animal does not stop at the end of the human avenue, and there is a hurry-scurry, and now and again a fall in the mud and much merriment.

Sometimes a very obstinate brute will take half a dozen men to detach him from his comrades, and then make much demur to running the gauntlet of switches and whips. These colts are the chief centre of attraction, for A little farther down the Hill we come on the owners and dealers of the broken horses, a few hackneys, but mostly the comparatively light and clean-legged horses used for general farm work in the fell-country, but not quite out of place in a dog-cart.....I watched many bargainings and a few actual sales, invariably evidenced by a mutual slapping of hands.

Of warranties and guarantees there seemed to be very little, the principle of Caveat emptor being the ruling one at Brough Hill." Brough is gone, Appleby lives on. In fact, A. Wren Rumney’s 1900 description still applies to Appleby in 1999, especially on the Tuesday, where still there are men in hat and waistcoat who are never without a nutmeg and a bootlace (a horse loves the smell of nutmeg and will follow you anywhere with a bootlace tied around its tongue).

Tuesday is still the main sale day. On other days they wash their horses in the River Eden and generally have a party. Sometimes the party gets wild. Most years at the Fair there are accidents. Often these involve a horse’s owner’s son showing off, driving too fast or doing something silly. Is this all that’s left of the horse fair? A few horsey boy-racers, making their rom statement against the gadje world of Astra Gti’s? Thirty years ago, The Beatles had disbanded but a thousand horses were still being sold in Appleby Fair week. Forty years, and the majority of Fair-goers came in living wagons drawn by horse, almost always a coloured (US: ‘painted’) heavy cob of about 14 hands, almost always with a ‘sider’ to help with the hills.

A sider is another similar animal, hitched on the off-side with traces running back to a swingle-tree hanging from a ring bolt underneath the wagon-side. The sider has a rope from his head to a ring on the shaft horse’s collar, and a single rein goes from driver to offside snaff le rings. Your sider might also be a trainee, because the only horse a gypsy will have to pull a living wagon is one which was put exclusively to the job the minute it could step onto a road. This junior, pupil sider will just have a short rope to the trace ring of its mentor, preferably its mother. Thus will it learn by experience how to be the means of propulsion of a freeborn man and his family.

In fact, that horse becomes part of the family, and the best fed and best looked after member of it. Some gypsies still come to Appleby in a varda drawn by a coloured horse. More likely, they’ll bring their Ledge Waggons and their Bow Tops along the motorway on a low-loader. Most likely, they’ll be in an extremely fancy, chromium plated mobile home, perhaps drawn by their working pick-up or Tran sit van, perhaps by the most spectacular possible 4WD megajeep (often hired, for a week of flash).

Few come to the Fair to make money out of horses. Appleby Fair, like the horse, is mainly a form of amusement, so how can the Fair go on when there is no real amount of serious, money-making horse-dealing as the driving force? The fortune telling, the wagons on the hill, the horse washing in the river, the picturesque characters, all of it must be there or the tourists will stop coming. If the tourists stop coming, the town will not tolerate the use and abuse of its fields, streets, property and people by thousands of gypsies licensed to party. The gypsies know this. They know that their annual week's holiday and chance to assert their gypsiness will fade away unless they keep their act together. So while the show and the flash used to be a side issue, now it’s the main thing and soon will be the only thing.

So, look closely at Appleby New Fair. The glory days are going. Of course the real glory days were long ago anyway, before the steering wheel replaced the reins, and anyone who wants to hear about them had better buy a few pints for a gypsy aged at least 60 and preferably more. Or, you can just come and look at the horses. This year, it’s 3rd to 9th June.