The English Gypsy caravan

Horse-drawn living waggons have been in use for at least two hundred years and the best were built in Victorian England.
The people of the roads called their home their waggon, van or vardo, but house-dwellers called it a Gypsy caravan. It was the Gypsy's most valued possession.
This house on wheels is brightly painted, often decorated with real gold leaf, has a double bed, cupboards, a small stove and a chimney and a rack and pan-box at the rear. The whole sufficiently light in weight to be drawn by one horse.
Many years ago there were hundreds of them on the roads of the British Isles, but many modern time rules and regulations - some being rather unfair, have made travelling life very difficult. Only very few travelling people still live in their horse-drawn caravans, most have gone over to trucks and trailers or became house-dwellers. Once buying and selling horses, they now have picked up the trade of car mechanics and scrap metal merchants.
There are several types of Gypsy caravans, and our caravan is a Bow Top: it has a round canvas top on a bowed wood frame. The shape of our roof is not totally round, but more like a horseshoe. Bow Top caravans combine elegance with lightness, durability and a low centre of gravity, so it is not likely to overturn. Its green sheet of canvas blends nicely with the hedgerows and because there are no side windows, you hardly notice it at night. Travelling people were often chased away when noticed, so that's why this type of caravan was rather popular with the Gypsies.
Gypsies did not build their own waggons but bought them from 'a gorgio, or gaujo' waggon-builder. It needs many skills to build a good waggon, a place to build it, investment in tools and timber. Thus a settled way of life - anathema to the Gypsy of those days.

You can still find Gypsy caravans for sale but advertisements offering Gypsy caravans for sale over a 100 years old, should be treated with reserve. They were not built of hard, century lasting timbers. and often suffered rough treatment and neglect. They rotted away, were badly painted over and some of them were burned ritually when their owner died.
A reliable adress if you want to buy an authentic Gypsy caravan is: www.gypsy-caravans.co.uk

Our horses

We have four horses at the moment, well, if you consider horse number 4 a horse: she is just 80 cm. high and is my daughter's first pony. We bought her when my daughter was one and a half year old and used her mostly as a buggy. Easy transport in the woods. She is called Pixie, 19 years old, and an appaloosa mini pony. An appaloosa is a spotted horse, the equine counterpart af the spotted Dalmation dog. Pixie was born in Devon, Great Britain and came to Holland as a two-year-old. She moved with us to Denmark.

We lived in Holland before and there we bred Icelandic horses and rode international competitions with them. Now, we only have one Icelandic mare that moved with us to Denmark. She is called Ykja, and a very friendly, small black mare. She is five-gaited, which means that she can walk, trot and canter like any other horse and has tölt and pace as extra gaits. Tölt has a clear four-time rhythm, the horse moves one leg at a time. The head and neck of the horse are held high and the horse has a high action in the front legs. A very comfortable gait. Pace is a two-beat lateral gait with suspension, performed in two-time and at high speed. Like the overdrive of a car.

And then there is Shanty, our big friendly tinker horse. Black and white with a lot of manes and long socks. We bought her because we needed a horse to pull our gypsy caravan, as tinker horses have done  for hundreds of years. They were and still are, the favourite horses of the travelling people in Great Britain. These people earned some money by mending pots and pans - they were tinsmiths, or tinkers and so their horses were called 'tinker horses'.
If ever you want to see a whole lot of these beautiful strong horses - and their intriguing owners -, you should go to Appleby Fair in June, the annual gathering of travelling people in the North of England.
In 2003 we spent two weeks in Ireland, travelling around in a horse-drawn caravan, and once smitten, we bought a gypsy caravan ourself in 2006. In Devon.....  And we have many happy memories travelling with it in Holland. With Shanty, of course.

The gypsy caravan moved with us to Denmark, and we use it in the summer as an extra bed for children staying at our B&B.
We train Shanty with our sulky, do a lot of driving on busy roads, so she won't loose the feel for the traffic, and we usually take one of our guests along. It is such fun to drive this lovely horse. Last summer I drove a lot through the sea as well, great fun, but a lot of rust on your wheels....

And last, but not least, there is my daughter's new horse, a real mustang. Born in Denmark, but both its parents were born in the wild in Oregon and then caught, trained and sold to Denmark.
He is called Lightning, four years old, and he has a lot of energy. We just started training him and my daughter trains him to be a western horse, so we take him to clinics with real cowboys from the USA.

Mustangs are the descendants of the horses the Spanish brought over to America after Columbus. They escaped, or were turned loose, and lived in freedom for hundreds of years. So, they are very clever and independent horses. The Native American people used to select their riding horses from these wild herds, and when the big ranches needed more land for their cows, mustangs were threatened with extinction. Nowadays they are protected and every year there is a number of mustangs for sale.

The cat that found us

We always have had cats throughout my life, but after the last one died at the age of 19, I did not want a new one.
But one day early September last year while walking around my neighbours Xmas trees with visiting friends, a tiny little cat ran after us, wailing dramatically. I had never seen such a meagre cat. It was just fur and bones.
But it did not give up, and kept on running after us all the time. We tried to ignore it, as no, I did not want another cat. But every time we stopped it just grabbed our legs and held tight.
Of course we gave in and took it home. It was so hungry it even started sucking my daughters clothes. We fed it small bits and within a couple of days it had recovered from its ordeal: we by then heard about some people from a nearby village that had left a cardboard box with unwanted kittens near a farm close to ours. People like that are cruel cowards, as no farmer wants more cats, they have loads of them already, and who knows what became of the rest of these poor kittens. This one was very lucky, and that is what he thinks himself as well, he really is a character. A little Moghul prince.
And he even got a Kashmiri name: Pamposh, meaning 'Lotus'.

A house for the kestrel
I already told you we have extremely nice neighbours, and last week two of them helped me to put up a nesting house for the kestrel ( falco tinnunculus). Well, one of them had a nesting house, and the other came to put it up.
It all started while discussing kestrels with my neighbour Søren last summer, and he mentioned he could put up a nesting house for them at my place.
Søren has a nesting house himself and last summer 'his' kestrels raised 6 healthy youngsters. Which is very special as kestrels normally only have 3-6 eggs.
Kestrels are rather small birds, 31-37 cm and they are common around here, most days you can see them 'praying' above our field, hunting mice.
So late summer, neighbour Søren came to inspect my place, looking for the best possible place to put this nesting house up. Summer became autumn, autumn became winter, and by the time I had completely forgotten about this nesting house, Søren was back with a very nice nesting house, which our neighbour Carsten ( yes, you have already read about him) did not use. Carsten had made two nesting houses for kestrels, but had only put one up, so he gave us the other one.
It was not easily done, it is a heavy nesting house, and it was a very cold morning. And I have to admit that Søren did all the hard work while I was just holding the ladder and forwarding the screwdriver....
But the result is great, I can watch the nesting house from my own window all the time.

So now we are waiting for mr. and mrs. Kestrel to move in.