As part of one of my assignments I am going to visit the gypsy horse fair on Thursday 23rd October. I have been to a couple of gyspy fairs before and I am really excited to be going and photographingwhilst turning it in to a project. My plan is to take with me my Digital slr with my standard lens along with a wide angle lens. I am hoping to photograph allot of portriats and actually conversing with a few people who can tell me more about the history behind it and what the days consist of. With the photography aspect also I would like to get a few landscapes in of the actualy fair as a whole so in my project there will be a variety of photographs down to different stances, portraiture , landscape, close ups of objects, shutter drag with the horses moving and using different shutterspeds . I will also be taking my film camera to experiemnt with and shoot on film .
The gypsy horse fair attracts hundreds of sightseers to Stow twice a year. Gipsies gather from all corners of England for a meet and greet and hundreds of horses are paraded and sold, all in one day. It's quite a site! So how did it all begin and why Stow-on-the-Wold. As you might expect, when dealing with a Cotswold tradition, you have to go back a very long way.
Stow fair became one of the largest in the country and it's influence showed itself in the way farmers made their plans for buying and selling livestock and the agreements they reached when hiring workers. A term of employment for farm labourers and domestic workers was based on the dates of the fair. In one village, no horse was sold until after Stow fair, in another village nearby, all lambs became sheep on Stow fair day and even my father-in-law never planted his runner beans until after Stow fair.
As the importance of sheep declined in the Cotswolds the character of the fair slowly changed and it became a horse fair favoured by farmers, huntsmen, professional horse dealers and gipsies. In recent years the fun fair stopped visiting the town and the horse sales involving the farmers and dealers split from the traveling people and moved to Andoversford, about 6 miles to the east of Cheltenham. So now, we are left with the gipsy horse fair, one of the biggest gatherings of its kind in England. As many arrive in traditional horse drawn caravans, it as become popular with photographers, artists, and the public who don't want to miss the atmosphere of such a colourful event.
