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Damian Le Bas is of Gypsy stock (he insists on the upper case throughout his book). His beloved great-grandmother told him stories in the Romani tongue of atchin tans, ‘the stopping places’ where families would put up for the night in wagons and hazel-rib tents. Le Bas makes a year-long journey round Britain, exploring these places and the lore behind them. It was a voyage, he says, from the fixed community he grew up in to ‘the world of wagons and tents that passed in the decades before I was born’. In those years, four generations of his family had a pitch at Petersfield market, where they sold flowers.

Le Bas is interested in the Gypsiness that has survived the ‘transition from nomadic to settled life’. As he explains: ‘I was raised, and still live, in a Romany psychological realm; a mental Gypsyland.’ He has non–Gypsy blood, fair hair and blue eyes, though ‘there is no such thing as a racially pure Gypsy: over a 1,000-year migration, it is virtually impossible that there will have been no mingling in the line’.