Traveller
culture has evolved and been sustained by life on the road and its expression
through dance, music and song.
Storytelling was
important, for these folk arts are essentially participatory and serve to bring
people together, helping to strengthen the bonds between them.
Travellers renewed old friendships and strengthened family bonds when they pulled
up on a farm for picking or at one of the many horse fairs that were held annually
across the country that.
These were times when gossip and news were currency and there was music, dance
and song in the pubs or around the fires at night.
Many Travellers who were themselves born on the roadside in bender tents or alongside
horse-drawn wagons, following an ancient pattern of existence, are now watching
their children and grandchildren growing up in radically different circumstances.
Forced into adapting to an alien way of life, it becomes even more important to
support and nurture the language, traditions and culture that will sustain the
identity of the community and the self-confidence and self-esteem of its members.
Modern day Gypsy Travellers remain proud of their cultural inheritance and still
seek to express it in the way they live whether it is by maintaining the language
or in the decorative styles and fashions that they follow.
Modern
times 
