Appleby Horse Fair, Appleby, England

Every June for the past couple of hundred years, English and Welsh gypsies, as well as Scottish and Irish “travelers”, have gathered in the small cumbrian town of Appleby-in-Westmorland to buy and sell horses. The event is known as the Appleby Horse Fair and was held the weekend we were recently in Northern England. When there’s a fair or event of traditional and historical relevance, and we’re nearby, count us in.

While everyone agrees that this horse trading (literally) event has been going on in Appleby for at least a couple of centuries, there’s disagreement over exactly how long. Some say the event was chartered by King James II in 1685, though it likely had been going on for some time before that. The current format of the event can be definitively dated to 1775.

Horse Bathing in the River

The fair is more an excuse to gather now than to trade horses, and gather they do. Somewhere around 15,000 gypsies and travelers (not of Romani descent) descend on Appleby starting the week before. We saw them camped along the highways by the hundreds, their horses tied or pinned up, their ornately decorated wagons intermingled with modern camper trailers (“caravans”, as the English call travel trailers). To top it all off, another 30,000 or so of their closest friends and spectators like us come for the show as well.

And what a show it is. That’s saying a lot for an event that has no organized activities, no specific agenda. At one time it was also (reportedly) an opportunity for the gypsy clan leaders to meet and discuss their “affairs” (as one local book described). Today it’s mainly an opportunity for horse owners to show off their animals, their carts, their wagons and accoutrements by running them up and down Appleby’s main street. It’s also an opportunity for the young girls to dress on the trampy side and for significant quantities of beer to be consumed. Past events have gotten rowdy, but at this year’s events the efficient English police were present in sufficiently crowd-controlling numbers (as were the RSPCA: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) to keep the event peaceful and the horses safe.