Appleby Horse Fair: June 4th-6th 2009

For our first excursion we were at Appleby Horse Fair. We stayed on Fair Hill and spoke to a number of people on the matter of  the relationship between travelling people and their animals. We were interested to know what differences a more itinerant lifestyle had on attitudes towards personal space and the encroachment of other species.

Radio Animal in the thick of it on Fair Hill. Appleby Horse Fair is the biggest, most alluring and enduring gathering of travelling people in Europe – ‘the Romany Mecca’. (Billy Welch is the organizer of the Appleby Horse Fair and here he talks about the travellers’ diet, regard of ‘nature’ and attitude towards the horses, other animals and the notion of pests.

Billy Lloyd discusses witnessing the unsolicited killing of a may bug – at dawn and then estimates the limits of equine pain