Adopting a belt-and-braces approach, the council placards feature not one but two silhouettes of caravans — the traditional bow-top variety and its modern successor — with red crosses struck through each. That is not to say that all of the incomers are ungrateful for the welcome. Some set up camp next to the posts, and use them for firewood.

In case the signs sprinkled around the town like confetti did not communicate the message, they are often punctuated by large boulders plonked on to verges. This year, one farmer went even further, spraying cow manure across his field and the public byway beside it.

The river in which the steeds of the Appleby Horse Fair are ritually washed may be called the Eden, but this market town — slap bang in the middle of the North Pennines, Lake District and Yorkshire Dales — has not quite been an idyllic paradise over the past week.

The fair, which has been taking place annually since 1775 and returned over the weekend for the first time since the pandemic, attracts an estimated 30,000 people (mostly tourists) to an area with a population of just 3,000.

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Appleby is historically about buying and selling horses, some for up to £30,000. They are ridden into the river — watched eagerly by RSPCA officers — before being washed with Fairy liquid and groomed for market. Then they are raced down a section of road known as Flashing Lane (“flashing” means showing off a horse). Finally, the bartering takes place with a patter as breakneck as the galloping, before the sale is secured with a slap of the hand (in an era of Covid hygiene protocols, the time-honoured spitting on the palm appears to have fallen out of favour).

However, the largest Gypsy gathering in Britain, and perhaps the world, is about so much more than mares and stallions. With the majority of the pilgrims (of all varieties, from Romanies, who trace their history back to 11th century India, to English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Travellers) now living in fixed accommodation, this is an annual chance to reconnect with their heritage and meet up with old friends and extended family.

They congregate over meals of bacon pudding (a steamed suet roly poly) or Joe Grey stew (a sausage and potato goulash). Many youngsters come here to meet their future spouses. The young women arrive dressed to the nines and freshly fake-tanned, marrying their ancient culture with a more modern, bling aesthetic. One older Romany tells me she calls them the “Oompa-Loompas”. She adds that this is the only chance she has to wear her gold earrings, traditional hairstyle and flowing skirts, as she hides her ethnicity from friends and colleagues.

“It’s literally sacred to us,” says Billy Welch, Britain’s Shera Rom, or Head Gypsy, as he walks around Fair Hill, the farm on which his people have camped for centuries. “Nowhere in the world do we feel welcome. Except here. This is our Jerusalem. This is our Mecca.”

But legislative clouds hang over these misty moors. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, going through the House of Lords, would turn trespass, currently a civil matter, into a criminal offence. A person with a vehicle who resides or intends to reside on land without consent of the occupier; who has caused “or is likely to” cause significant damage, disruption or distress; and who refuses to move on when asked to by police could have their mobile home — containing all their possessions — seized, and face three months’ imprisonment or a fine of £2,500, or both.

Liberty has described the “potentially unlawful” proposals as “a direct attack on the way of life for many in these communities”, who could be rendered homeless. The Jewish Board of Deputies and Stand Up To Racism have also rallied to the cause.

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Many fear the new law, covering England and Wales, could spell the end of Appleby, and therefore centuries of Gypsy culture, as some travel with their horses for up to 400 miles, from as far afield as Cornwall, making a journey lasting days or weeks. They need to rest on the side of the road and, with nowhere legal to stop, risk having their priceless hand-gilded “vardos” seized by police.

Labour peer Baroness Whitaker, who opposes the bill, will speak at its second reading. She tells me: “The Government justifies its trigger for this hostile action as the causation of ‘significant damage, disruption or distress’. But these are highly subjective terms, and given the widespread prejudice already evinced, open to cruel abuse.” She argues it is “clearly a discriminatory provision” that “looks suspiciously like a dog-whistle appeal to prejudice and racism”, adding: “We do not force other minority ethnic peoples to forgo their lifestyle.”

Strikingly, one Gypsy charity’s analysis of police forces’ submissions to the government consultation found 75% felt current powers were sufficient and 84% did not support criminalisation, while 65% said lack of site provision was the real problem.

But a Home Office spokesperson was resolute: “Unauthorised encampments can cause misery to those who live nearby, with excessive noise and littering, and people unable to access their land.”

Certainly a law that keeps the hordes away from Appleby would please some locals — who have to bear the cost of policing, road closures, toilets and rubbish clearance, and endure the inconvenience of their population growing tenfold over the course of a weekend.

After a public meeting in 2018, Cumbria’s police and crime commissioner Peter McCall, who said some residents felt “as if they had been invaded”, admitted: “At one point, I did say that if I had a magic wand I would ban it. But I went on to say that was not going to happen.” Many pubs and shops simply close for the duration, missing out on a boom in profits in favour of avoiding feared vandalism and disorder.

None of the locals opposing the fair — so vocal on Facebook groups and at town meetings — would speak on the record, presumably worried about being accused of bigotry. One local says that when Channel 5 made a 2019 documentary, with the understated title The Town The Gypsies Took Over, the only voice producers could find to give an extended criticism of the fair lived in a different town.

But one B&B owner in a neighbouring village tells me — anonymously — that she is “absolutely furious”. “It’s the only time of year we lock our doors,” she says. “It’s the ones who want to do what they want, where they want and not have to pay for it. Many shops close because of theft. I especially mind at the moment, when there have been so many restrictions on the rest of us.” Perhaps she is right to be angry; the number of arrests at this year’s fair was its highest in seven years.

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To Britain’s estimated 500,000 Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (who have been in England since at least the 16th century), such opposition is nothing new. Read any official report on the communities and you will be struck by a catalogue of state-sponsored discrimination and stunted life chances.

Indeed, the Government admitted in 2019 that they “are among the most disadvantaged people in the country”. They have relatively low literacy rates and the worst school attainment of all ethnic groups. One in five Gypsy Traveller mothers will suffer the loss of a child, compared with one in 100 for the rest of the population. And their life expectancy is 10 to 12 years shorter than average.

Welch says the collective memory of the murder of an estimated 500,000 European Roma during the Holocaust — or Romani Porajmos — is “very fresh in our minds”. The reason Appleby is so central in the calendar, he says, is because so many other gatherings across the world have vanished. “The erosion of the other events is a result of these kinds of laws all over the world. In recent years, we’ve noticed a big rise in racism. But we’ve been here 500 years. We’re as British as anybody else.”

Hertfordshire-based Sherrie Smith, co-founder of the Drive to Survive campaign against the bill, knows all about the long tail of unwanted interventions into Gypsy life. Her family has lived in fixed accommodation since her grandmother was forced off a site in 1959.

But she says the proposed legislation “will affect us all – in hate, prejudice, the narrative. The government has failed us for decades, so why are they adding to it? There’s not a day you’re not treated differently, but it’s definitely worse now than it’s been, ever.”

Sitting in her hired caravan, Smith details a series of housing Catch-22s that she wants solved, instead of what she sees as an act of legislating her people’s nomadic culture out of existence. In January, there were reported to be 1,700 families on waiting lists for pitches on public Traveller sites, with 59 permanent pitches available. (A statutory duty to establish authorised sites was repealed in 1994.) And if a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller can afford to buy their own land and seeks planning permission, a social media campaign will begin, along with local politicians who “spit venom”.

“So, what do we do, then?” she asks with her hands in the air. “You’ve got no social housing.” Smith sees the proposals as a cheap piece of populism with chilling implications. “It’s cultural genocide. It’s forced assimilation.”

Meanwhile, over the clip-clop of passing hoofs, a group of pensioners sitting on the steps of a house overlooking the river say they enjoy the spectacle provided by “all the carry-on with the horses”.

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A trio of women who volunteer at the Age Concern charity shop in the town centre are similarly unfussed. “They’re very friendly, the Gypsies,” says one. “It livens us up a little bit. You only hear people who are running them down.” Her colleague chips in: “It’s the one time of year when people in Appleby think they’re a lot better than everybody else. And in reality, everybody’s the same. It’s no worse than a bunch of people going to Blackpool.”

The first adds: “We’re perfectly happy, especially the people that’s lived here a long time. There’s a lot of new housing estates now. Really, they know the fair’s here every year and they still buy a house, but they twine like hell.”

The only thing she resents, she insists, is funding superfluous signage. “We’re paying for the council to go about putting posts everywhere.”

June and July are when the horse racing calendar reaches its peak, carnivalesque events which illustrate one of the great curiosities of English life: how so many social patterns are U-shaped — popular with the toffs at the top and the plebs at the bottom, with not much interest in between.

The most eventful day in the racing calendar is Ladies Day at Ascot, a term that dates back to an anonymous poem written in 1823 which declared: “Ladies’ Day… when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine.” Although this is the sport of kings, Ladies Day tends to be best known for the various drunken fights between women in expensive dresses, often while their menfolk lie passed out on the grass. This has become so frequent as to be almost part of English culture, like the Friday before Christmas where people are allowed to have a punch-up.

Horse racing sums up the point once made by the great Billy Connolly when he said: “The proper serious upper class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks. What I found when I was in the pub was the rich and the successful from millionaires’ row mixed very easily with the council house people — and it was the V-necked jumper Volvo mob who had the problem. They wondered why [the upper class] were talking to them fucking scrubbers.”

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The Army is the classic example of an institution popular at both ends of the social spectrum, with public school-educated Ruperts in the officers’ mess and squaddies in the ranks, still heavily recruited from poorer areas. Except during two world wars, no one in my family, bred by hundreds of years of reading-related short-sightedness and bourgeoise cowardice, has ever considered the military. It would be almost inconceivable for someone in the middle of the English class system to do so.

But that has always been the case. The late medieval satire Le roman de Renart le contrefait observed that: “When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”

Fighting was the original role of the aristocracy, and it was not until the 14^th century that rich merchants like Michael de la Pole — whose father rather vulgarly made his money in wool rather than stabbing someone while riding a horse — began to enter the highest ranks. Even in modern conflict the nobility has made an outsized sacrifice, with the great public schools losing hugely disproportionate numbers in the First World War. (Old Etonians suffered twice the average casualty rate.)

Big families are another marker of class, with those at each end of the socio-demographic index having the highest fertility. True aristocrats, just like true proletariats, are also more likely to spend a great deal of time with family members, and they are both more likely to give their children wacky names, whether it’s Prince, Rara or Zenia.

Their surnames are often hard to tell apart, too. During the recent European Championship, Birmingham MP Jess Philips tweeted: “My youngest’s question for tonight ‘why do footballers never have double-barrelled names?’”

It was interpreted as being a statement on the England heroes’ proletarian origins, yet it was a strange thing to write without checking — because countless English footballers have double-barrelled names, to such an extent that it’s a cliché. Double-barrelled names are a classic example of the class U-curve.

Today horse racing remains the great class uniter, but once upon a time there were a whole variety of “sports” — essentially animal torture — enjoyed both by toffs and peasants. As Ian Mortimer recalls in his entertaining book on the Regency period, the Westminster dog pit, where hounds would rip various other animals to pieces, was tremendously popular with both the upper classes and poor; when Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, the future tsar, came to London he absolutely loved it.

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Boxing was also a very upper-and-lower class sport, and fashionable gentleman known as “the Fancy” would attend London pugilist schools alongside scrawny cockneys. Poet Robert Southey said that “a boxing-match settles all disputes among the lower classes, and when it is over they shake hands, and are friends”, while the upper-class went for duelling instead.

Some aristocrats liked fighting so much they sought out the company of rough working men to give them a good scrap, among them Regency rake and eccentric, and Tory MP, “Mad” Jack Mytton. Mytton, a member of the Shropshire squirarchy, had attended Cambridge, where he drank 2,000 bottles of port and failed to graduate, before going on a Grand Tour and joining the Army. The perfect aristo.

Mytton was a great enthusiast of hunting, another popular sport among both ends of the spectrum, and when on one occasion a Welsh miner got in his way while out enjoying his favourite pastime, he dismounted and challenged him to a fight. The two men punched each other continually during 20 rounds of bare-knuckle boxing and when the Welshmen surrendered the Tory gave him 10 shillings for his trouble. A fun day was had by all.

Similarly, tattoos have historically been popular among aristocrats and the urban poor. Edward VII had a cross and George V a dragon, which he got while in the Navy, while Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake on her wrist. Tattoos are now ubiquitous and classless, but people’s social status can often still be marked out by fashion, an area where working-class men in their 20s have often aped the aristocratic look; the most famous case of this is Burberry, the brand which went from being a very Sloane Ranger/Country Life outfit to ubiquitous among football hooligans at one point.

But then perhaps the most obvious — and largely forgotten — product of upper-lower class cooperation is football itself. In Beastly Fury, his account of the birth of the national sport, Richard Sanders wrote how the football came about from a mixture of (extremely violent) public-school culture and peasant folk traditions. The game had been popular in medieval England, repeatedly banned as it invariably ended with disorder, until the custom was largely suppressed in the early Victorian period. (Remnants of the old game are still played in a few villages in England, if that’s your kind of thing.)

The aristocracy tolerated these anarchic events but the new industrialists were hostile, as were the trade unions, one union leader denouncing football as “barbarous recklessness and supreme folly”. They especially disliked how upper-class men would stand on the sidelines cheering it on as all great fun, one complaining “Your ‘Betters’ have been foremost in this fête, hallooing you like brute dogs to the strife”. Shrovetide football, often accompanied by widespread violence, was banned by middle-class campaigners who disliked the “barbarous and disgusting play of football”, as one called it.

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But the rural poor loved it, as did the toffs, with variations of football surviving in the great public schools where “the ancient folk sport was given a new lease of life in the mid-nineteenth century when it came close to dying out among the common people”.

From the late 1830s there was a football scene at Cambridge University, the only problem being that all the public schools played different rules, some vastly so (Rugby especially). Football came to be pioneered by the likes of former Harrow schoolboys John and Charles Alcock, yet the real hotbed of the game was in Sheffield, home to the world’s oldest surviving football club; Sanders suggests that this was because the local folk game had lingered in this part of Yorkshire in the hill villages of Penistone, Thurlstone and Holmforth. “Association football was now essentially a fusion of the Charterhouse/Westminster-influenced game played in London and the more folk-influenced game that had emerged from Sheffield.”

Eventually football would become a heavily working-class sport, only becoming truly classless from the 1990s, but its origins lie in Connolly horseshoe theory. Unlike rugby, however, football didn’t split along class lines, because the upper-class FA were willing to accept professionalism, whereas the RFA refused, leading northern teams to form the Rugby League. Significantly, Sanders attributes this to the aristocratic confidence of football’s founders. “It may well be that this reflected the newer, lower-status public schools many of the men running rugby had attended,” he wrote, “they were less secure socially than the Eton and Harrow men who ran football and therefore less comfortable compromising.”

And this has always been the case. Aristocrats and poor can act like each other, dress like each other or indulge in the same pastimes, partly because no one is going to mistake them. As Scott Alexander explained in his seminal essay Right is the New Left, most fashions try to signal that someone is a notch above their real status, while avoiding giving the signal of being the status immediately under.

But you’re never going to be mistaken for someone several notches above or below. A few children now have double-barrelled names but one reason it has not proved so popular among progressive middle-class parents may be the signal; if you’re the first person in your family to go to university and you’re now middle class, no one is going to mistake you for a double-barrelled aristocrat who lives on an estate; but they may mistake you for a double-barrelled struggling single mum who lives on an estate.

We also tend to resent or dislike those closest to us in the pecking order. Despite the folksy image, Jess Phillips, like many prominent Labour MPs, comes from the comfortable ranks of the bourgeoisie, her mother having been a senior NHS administrator. Their hereditary class enemies are the traditionally Tory-voting members of the aristocracy and squirearchy just above them — the double-barrelled brigade — and many a political or journalistic worldview was formed by class resentments at Oxford and Cambridge, against those toffs from the Bullingdon Club. 

But while people are more likely to feel hostility to people immediately above or below them on the social spectrum, those more distant may feel either irrelevant or a curiosity. We don’t compare our lives to people unlike us, nor feel our status threatened. That might explain why people across the country continue to vote for the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, almost caricature Old Etonians, because they feel that like them, they are properly fucking nuts.