THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

On the Yorkshire Moors aged three or four, I remember my grandmother shouting to my mother over the field: ‘Be careful! Be careful! The gypsies will take him!’  And seeing a whole line, just over the hedge, of gypsy caravans moving up a lane and then a gypsy boy, very brown, on a piebald pony stripped to the waist riding by and being envious in some way or another.

Bruce Chatwin in Shakespeare/Chatwin, 1999