Wanderers in the New Forest

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I hope you’re excited to see giant Sequoia trees in the UK as part of the New Forest Tall Trees Trail! If you have any questions not covered above, then please let us know in the comments below and we’ll reply asap… The singing of the English Gypsy men is usually a disappointment, especially when contrasted to the romantic beauty of Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and many French Gypsy singers. I found the English mostly raucous and bawdy and I never wanted to hear much of it. Eiza told me once that, being a Gypsy, her favourite way of spending her time would be out in the forest by a big wood fire, a hook and a ball of string with her, making rabbit nets and smoking 'baccy'. Her choice seemed pathetic considering what unnatural disease had done to the forest rabbit population, and the present-day price of 'baccy' which made it almost prohibitive for the Gypsies unless they had well-paid employment, which Eiza had not, as she worked mostly by herself as a collector of rags since the death of her pony-trader husband. I am thankful that Jenny Vize is painting the spirit of the New Forest Gypsies and painting so powerfully, that she will keep alive the old Gypsy beauty that the compounds are crushing out of existence. Like my friend Georges Jardin in Provence, who lives amongst the Gypsies there and knows them in all their moods: both are chroniclers of Gypsy life. This is inherently linked to “Britain’s most famous witch” who once lived here in the 1950’s: Sybil Leek.

Unfortunately, her fame and lifestyle attracted a huge amount of interest and people began to besiege her home.Eiza told me about her own wreath for her Uncle Robert Cooper's funeral. She had been entirely without money to buy flowers and no wild ones to be had around her then, therefore she had made one of best artificial, melting down her only candle to glaze the flowers and make them weather-proof. Such a race of people, hard-working and thrifty (apart from the men's beer 'sprees' in the pubs) for the lazy Gypsy sleeping his days away in the sun, is a myth 'it can be understood what resentment is felt by the Gypsies at the accusations of child-stealing yet and frequently being directed at them, to the extent of newspaper reports about 'Gypsy-type' women, and official police searches of the compounds and even private Gypsy dwelling-places. Whenever a child is missing from its pram the local Gypsies come under suspicion, and the searches begin. Nor is this activity confined to the police. A school-mistress friend, Olive Potter, who has sympathy for the New Forest Gypsies and is liked by them, told me that at classes where she taught in forest schools, it was frequent for a jetty-haired, jetty-eyed, swarthy Gypsy child, to raise a hand and protest concerning a bench-mate. When the Wessex biannual art exhibition was held, Jenny Vize entered two oil paintings of Gypsies, a family group, man, woman and child, and a van interior, with figures against the light of a fire-stove. Both pictures were accepted: and then came the deserved success. Jenny had used her Welsh origin name of Eryl Vize, and had written the Romany titles beneath the English ones. There’s an excellent three-part YouTube series you can watch of an interview with Sybil before she passed away in 1982.

Johnson finished from the tightest of angles - and through the legs of Jose Sa - after getting on the end of Danilo's ball.Aside from witches and witch shops, Burley Village is also fraught with tales of smugglers and hidden treasure.