Bloody isn't it? Chain saws turning a huge swathe of countryside to rubbish and not a traveller in sight.

Those who denigrate travellers should reflect that in the course of economic progress, travellers have been systematically robbed of their camping sites until they literally have nowehere to stay. There is now not a single blade of grass, or patch of open earth anywhere in this country that isn't owned by someone.

I'm not trying to deny progress. I'm not trying to say that land should never be cleared when that clearance is for the human good. But it's extraordinary that the beneficiaries of progress should have the brass nerve to decry the very people who have been so severely disadvantaged by it.

Here's a quote from the Ewan MacColl/Charles Parker/Peggy Seeger Radio Ballad, The Travelling People. Read it and weep.

"My great grandfather, he looked at me one morning, we was sitting down, minding the horses, we was, he said, 'My son,' he said, 'Years ago, when I was a boy,' he said, 'See that place there, that park?' I says, 'Yes, Grandfather.' 'We used to stop on that', he said, 'Twelve month, two year at a time. Till a lord came along', he said, 'he put a bit of fence up and that's how they got the ground', he said, 'By pinching it, bit by bit.' That's how you come your squires and your lords. They've no more right to that ground than what you and I have.
The ground don't belong to no-one."

Better still, download the entire Travelling people script here . And if that doesn't move you to anger, the CD version, released by Topic Records certainly will.