Travellers are not all the same and we must accept that they do have a place in our society

AWEEK ago some travellers arrived in my home town of Ashbourne and set up camp on a sports field owned by the town’s secondary school. They left on Sunday night, and I won’t go into detail about the mess they left behind, but let’s just say I’m glad I went to inspect it and take pictures before I had my breakfast on Monday morning, and not straight after.

It didn’t help that pretty much the same thing happened almost exactly three years ago on the same PE field and, although the aftermath from that encampment wasn’t pretty, the mess being cleared up this week made the first lot look like The Waltons.

But between the tumultuous arrival on Tuesday night and their eventual departure on Sunday evening, reports of crime and antisocial behaviour in the town rocketed. In response to this, some of the town’s pubs closed early, or didn’t open at all on more than one occasion, and people were afraid to use the footpath through the field the caravans were pitched on after stories of abuse, volatile loose dogs, and cars driving around were circulated.

I’ve even spoken to elderly people living next to the field who were too afraid to leave their houses, or sleep, after being pestered for free water to fill up five-gallon containers.

The issue of travellers setting up authorised and unauthorised encampments in Ashbourne has been quite a hot topic over the past few years. Our district council is duty-bound to find a piece of land for two families who want to settle in the area, but they’re really struggling.

Every now and again a patch of land comes along that seems ideal, and the families are keen on it, but the people who live nearby soon unite in opposition and do their best to block the process, usually sending the whole saga back to square one.

I lived in Hatton for quite a long time before I could finally afford to move back to Ashbourne and, almost within earshot of my house, was a large community of settled travellers. They were a nice bunch, all things considered. They kept themselves to themselves and were never any trouble. I’ve also lived alongside one of the families that wants to settle in the Derbyshire Dales, when they set up an encampment close to my house in Ashbourne, and they were a bit noisy from time to time, but generally quite benign and, again, they just wanted to get on with their own lives.

But there’s a stigma attached to the travelling community which our would-be neighbours will never be able to shake off. And, of course, now that we’ve had to live alongside a transient group that high court enforcement officers described to me, in as many words as, “known to be violent”, this preconception has been made much, much worse.

Travellers follow a different cultural roadmap to us, and this might not sit well with us, but the district we live in likes to think of itself as inclusive to all minorities, so we must accept that travellers have a place in our society. And they, legally, have a right to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just as soon as the council finds a place for them to settle, that is.

But the animalistic behaviour I saw evidence of on the sports field on Monday will do absolutely nothing to help the district council as it tries again and again to convince us to accept the area’s legal responsibility and to welcome a small group of travellers onto a piece of land which may or may not end up being on our doorstep.

Whatever we think of travellers, they travel in family groups, with sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and grandparents. They’re human beings. And they might not all be as bad as each other.

But given what we’ve been through in Ashbourne over the past week, I can completely understand why people will struggle to agree with that.