There is something about caravans and the life the people who own them fascinates me.Life looks so unhurried. Shame that in today's society they have to have a warning sign on the back of the wagon as they go along the road. I coming home when I saw this caravan near Thirsk .I asked if I take a photograph and was answered with a friendly smile and a wave. Earlier in the day I had seen the travellers sat around the campfire but I do regret I didn't have time to stop them. The horses grazing on the verges. In warm weather I couldn't think of a better way to live . I don't think I could cope with the bad weather and winters these travellers have to cope with. I suppose the interest goes back to when I was a child. My mother used to recite a rythm to me which stirred the interested in me.It goes like this....
"I wish I live in a caravan ,with a horse to drive like a pedlar man
Where he comes from nobody knows,where he goes to- onward he goes.
His caravan has windows two,
And a chimney of time that the smoke comes through.
He has a wife and a baby brown
and they go travelling from town to town.
Chairs to mend and delf to sell.
He clashes the basins like a bell
Tea trays ,baskets ranged in order,plates with alphabets round the borders.
With the pedlar man I would like to roam
Then write a book when I get home.
All the people would read my book,just like the Travels of Captain Cook.
It was actually a poem written by William Brighty Rands[1823-1882] There was an extra verse in it when I looked it up but my mother never told me that.
The interest of travellers must run in our family as my Dad's cousin Blanche Marsden[nee Buckle]who lived at Byland Abbey wrote a book called "Where I pitch my caravan" I would love to have read it but have never seen anything of the book
