Rules Of The Road

From London to Galway in West Ireland, via Wales, a road movie seeks to capture the everyday life of tinkers, those journeymen who were once about one hundred thousand on the roads of the British Iles. Today, they number approximately twenty thousand in Ireland and eight thousand in Great Britain. Sociological developments in Ireland have left them excluded, and they have been deprived of the means of subsistence formerly offered by the small-scale traditional crafts of ironmongery and salvaging scrap iron. They are still unwilling to settle down, but they can no longer find ground on which to park their caravans. Frowned-upon and unloved as they are, these tinkers are a source of concern and suspicion. Meeting them and listening to the poems and songs of their extremely rich folklore affords an insight into the threatened world of the last nomads in the West.