A Travellers Story

In 1995, I was born in Aberdeen to a Scottish Traveller and her Anglo-Canadian partner; From there, I was named Sarah and brought to a caravan outside Kintore. I’m told my dad went into shock for a solid fortnight when my mum fell pregnant; doctors in Canada had told him that he could not have children.

They married when I was about six weeks old; my brother was born fourteen months after I was. For all we now lived in a house, Travelling culture still existed in our home.

When I was a year and a half old, we moved to Angus, my dad working for Harry Maiden, a steel fabrication firm in Montrose. We lived at Queen’s Park in Brechin and then Little Fithie. We then stayed at Haughs of Kinnaird, Windyedge Farm, Montrose Street and Highland Byers on Kinnaird Estate, all in or around Brechin. We then moved to Newbigging Farm, outside Montrose, and then to a house at West Ballochy, near Dun.

When I was ten years old, we moved again, this time to Ardverikie Estate, between Fort William and Aviemore. We had a brief stay in a flat in Laggan, a return to Ardverikie, and another house in Laggan.

This was a childhood filled with new places and constant and valuable learning. We had more interaction with animals than most children did, from the horses in the field next to us at Kinnaird Estate, to the pine martens and deer at Ardverikie. The pine martens needed to be fed at the windowsill so as to divert them from eating birds’ eggs. Living in remote places gave us the opportunity to learn practical skills, not least to plan ahead. We lived on farms, in woods, by a loch and in small villages, which provided us the ability to explore more of the country than many of our peers.

While we lived at Windyedge, before I was even old enough for nursery, my mum taught me to read, write, tell the time, and count. This made the first two years of primary school extremely boring to me.

I attended Andover, Rosemount and Gergask Primary Schools, then Kingussie High, Carnoustie High (when we moved back to Angus), Dundee and Angus College, before an apprenticeship in car mechanics.

I moved back down to Angus with my mum and brother to live in Muirdrum when I was sixteen. It was while living here that my dad died while living with his mum in Kemnay; he was fifty-one.

Hiding my Traveller heritage was, in practical terms, fairly simple. I carried my father’s surname, which wasn’t a name traditionally associated with Travellers. If my name was Newlands, McPhee, or McAllister, I may have found that more challenging.

Travellers in Angus are generally Scottish Travellers, a people distinct from their Irish, English and Romani counterparts. There are overlaps in language, tradition, and culture, of course, but each people is its own. Scottish Travellers’ language has its roots in archaic Scots and English, Gaelic and Romani, with the use differing between regions and even families. Certain traditions and habits, such as the preference to wash the body and cooking utensils under running water, come from a generational history of living outdoors. Ethnically, we are Scots. We have been here half a millennium, and many people, when investigating their family tree, will find themselves related to a Traveller.

But for as long as I can remember, I knew, for all it was often unsaid, that hiding my Traveller heritage was in the interests of my safety. Even in recent years, there have been political incidents – one candidate for councillor vowed to “deal with Traveller incursions,” language which seeks to present Travellers as an invasive and enemy species, proving to me that it is a form of racism still widely acceptable in society both here in Scotland and across the UK.

Throughout my formal education, I had the hard lesson that racial slurs directed at any other group were prohibited, but it was still considered normal to use the terms “tink,” “mink,” “pikey,” and “gypo.” Even “tinker” was used in a derogatory way, despite this being the word used by Travelling people for generations, describing themselves as such on census records and their birth, marriage, and death records. It originally came from the role Travellers had as travelling tinsmiths, “tinkering” with objects to fix or even make them. Aged about six, I used the word “mink” as a joke, as I had heard my friends calling each other the same thing as a synonym to “lazy,” “stupid” or “dirty” and did not know what it truly meant. My mum caught me saying it. I got a serious talking-to that day.

I learned, too, that there were words we used that the outside world did not. Words like “knickit” (pregnant), “luikie” (rat), “chovie” (shop), and “toll” (skirlie) were ones that even my dad managed to pick up, always said in his frankly bizarre accent of a man who was born in Canada, then raised in Aberdeenshire by parents from Hull, and then went back to Canada for eleven years.

One of my earliest memories is of eating custard creams on a berry field. My brother preferred to devour the berries themselves, which meant my mum was the only one of us being productive.

Through their nomadic culture, Travellers are generally hardworking and conscientious. Other nomadic groups are respected for these same traits and the lifestyle from which they developed. Throughout my mum’s childhood, Travellers often found work on farms due to the seasonal nature of the work and freedom of movement it provided. These days, many Travellers have moved to construction and other trades, which also allow movement as their work can be carried in a van with them.

Most Travellers now live in houses, flats, or static caravans. They do so for many reasons. Some are too ill to travel, some parents decided to settle for their children’s schooling, some find the conditions simply too harsh. Then there are the bureaucratic reasons. Access to education, healthcare and social security often requires a fixed address to be provided. Some travel during the school holidays, others will do so only in the summer months. There are Travellers who would otherwise go on the road, if the systems of society didn’t make it so difficult on a practical level.

During the pandemic of 2020, the difficulty many Travellers faced was that, unless your roof was falling in on top of you, you weren’t allowed tradespeople in your home, which meant many of the people working in that industry suddenly found themselves without work.

Though many people were happy with the respite from society that lockdown brought, there were Travellers who found it extremely difficult; not being able to leave their homes after a lifetime of movement took a toll on their mental health.

Travellers living in caravans also faced a dilemma in which they were being told to move on while simultaneously being told they could not move more than five miles from where they were. Fear caused people to report others for breaking rules, even when the rules had not been broken at all, which intensified the problem.

Later on in the pandemic, people discovered that the one holiday they could take was a “wild camp.” This gave people in Angus the inclination and opportunity to explore the country around them, and me the opportunity to share how to do this safely and cleanly.

It has taken most of my life to learn to be proud of both sides of my heritage. From the child who didn’t understand she had said a disgusting slur, to the teenager who had to sit quiet while it was said all around her, I am now a woman who knows what she is: both Scot and Traveller, with a dash of Canada and Yorkshire.