Home > Travel Writing > Ballinasloe Horse Fair

There are few sights more romantic than that of a brightly coloured gypsy wagon pulled onto a narrow verge, with a glossy piebald horse tethered nearby, and the smoke from a campfire snaking into the dusky twilight. I fell in love with this image when I was small, and promised myself that I would be a gypsy when I grew up. When I left school I travelled in Ireland and England for two years in a wagon. The autumn was my favourite time of year, time for the snap of frosty mornings, and time for horse fairs.

Gypsy horse fairs have changed very little over the years. Arrive at Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire in October, and you will find the streets of this normally cloying, quaint Cotswold town lined with strings of coloured horses and wagons. The same is true of Ballinasloe in the west of Ireland.

Geographically the fair is close to home: one hours’ flight from London to Shannon airport and another couple of hours’ drive in a hire car up the coast. Yet as an experience of another world, it is a million miles from the easy security of a London office.

You can buy almost any sort of horse here, from a classy race horse to a long-eared mule, but it is the gypsies who really dominate the fair, and for ten days every autumn the normally quiet town of Ballinasloe is transformed into a huge gypsy encampment. Flashy white chrome trailers jostle for position with traditional barrel-top wagons, and the large field below the church is dotted with ponies tethered to heavy metal stakes.

On fair days the green comes alive with horses. Small boys in ripped jeans riding wild-eyed coloured ponies force their way through the crowds, a stick ripped from the hedgerow stuck down their Wellington boots which they are not afraid to use. Young men with beguilingly crooked smiles and single-hoop earrings flash their trotting horses up and down the road with shouts of ‘mind your backs’ to unwitting spectators, the silver harness glinting like the shoes of the horses throwing up sparks as their hooves clatter down the road. A group of men will cluster around a particularly good looking horse, their greasy suits bulging around their tattooed arms, and back pockets full of wads of well- fingered bank notes. The taxman is brilliantly bypassed with every deal that is made here.

The smell of candy-floss and fried onions drifts through the crowds, and a small girl with dark eyes will try to sell you a canary in a wooden cage. Here it is possible to buy a pot-bellied stove and a cast iron kettle, but the romance of it is continually undercut by the kitsch. Gypsy style is inherently flashy, so you might also go home with a matching set of gold satin curtains and pillow cases, or a furry fake leopard skin bed spread.

The west of Ireland is generally wet, and so by late afternoon the stall holders will be packing up their wares from the muddy field and the gypsies returning to their cosy trailers. Remember them as you return to your life at home, and feel grateful for having experienced such an unconventional way of life. Both in Ireland and England the ways of the gypsies and tinkers have become increasingly marginal, and horse fairs like Ballinasloe have a history to them which, if lost, can never be replaced.