29th July 2025
Contrary to the opinions of those who know nothing and prefer to rise above the facts, Gypsies, Romanies as they prefer to be called are a good deal more sophisticated than most people imagine and have an enviably long oral history and tradition that can’t easily be researched by outsiders because it’s not written down. As one of those outsiders what little I know comes from my association with them whilst I was a parish priest. I got to know one family very well and we liked and respected one another. One young woman joined the congregation and despite having been taken out of school as soon as she reached puberty, she had a razor sharp mind; clever, thoughtful and highly intelligent. I won’t go any further, we’re still in touch.
Anyway, my object here is not just to write about the Romany traditions because, being on the outside, I know next to nothing about them. What I do know is that there is a folk medicine associated with travelling people, similar possibly to the Welsh traditions associated with the Physicians of Myddfai and based on streams of human knowledge and experience that could even be traced back to Greece and India.
Look through any list of British plant names and you’ll see lots of plant names ending in “wort”. It’s not the case that every plant with the same “wort” name ending had medicinal uses, some were used in foods and as flavourings; but it’s safe to assume that these plants were singled out for some usefulness which we occasionally no longer know. The herbal medicines of travelling people to which I want to add the owners and crews of narrow boats working the canal system must have been centred on what was “to hand” as they moved about the country. It wouldn’t be impossible to imagine that, as they travelled, they scattered seeds and useful plants on the roadsides and towpaths either in throwing out waste or providing later for their own use when they needed them.
There’s a well recognised problem that maps of plant distribution are liable to reflect the distribution of field botanists as much as the distribution of plants, and so I have to confess that our own records feature large numbers of canal and riverside plants because that’s where we most often walk. On the other hand, the kind of plants we most often record are specialists for that kind of environment so with that in mind I can say that I’ve only ever seen Gypsywort on the canalside towpaths, and it does have some interesting medicinal properties still being exploited for the treatment of breast complaints, thyroid problems and as a sedative. Later on in our walk yesterday we found Water Figwort –
- another plant used to treat skin complaints including haemorrhoids, hence the name figwort, because this complaint was so common and piles were known colloquially as “figs”. Then there was Purple loosestrife, which was used to treat diarrhoea with its (unproven) antibacterial properties but I can’t find any reference to sedative properties so the strife was probably at the other end, so to speak.
Imperforate wasn’t, it seems, used to treat melancholy but it was part of a treatment for TB and kidney complaints – very common ailments of poverty. Of course like drystone walling and unicycling it’s all very well having the kit but you really need the expertise as well – but travellers and bargees didn’t have much choice and so were necessarily using these herbal remedies because there was no other show in town. I wonder if anyone ever took a companionable stroll down a riverbank and recorded what a bargee and a Romany had to say about the plants they found. Sadly mutual distrust would have made such a conversation impossible and now it’s probably too late; but I’d really be up for that walk! These days plants are spread around today by cars and boots, not to mention nurseries and “wildflower meadow” seed mixes, much as they were spread in wool shoddy, ships’ ballast and manure in the past and so it’s getting harder to track how things get to where we find them, and so we’ll probably never know whether there’s a significant correlation between canal flora and bargee medicine. As for Romany medicine there’s still a small chance of uncovering some of the lore – in fact I’d be surprised if big pharma hadn’t skulked around the margins looking for something new to patent, but for now it’s more the sense of history that engages me. Our regular 5 mile stroll around the riverbank and the canal towpath is – in Alan Rayner’s neat distinction – a walk in nature rather than a walk through it, and is also a walk in history in the very same sense. “If these stones could talk” we sometimes say without thinking that indeed these stones, these plants do talk in their own quiet stoneish and plantish ways. I’m seized with the desire to understand more deeply how these plants were used, when they were used and whether they worked beyond the placebo effect. What’s certain is that when a plant is steeped in wine or boiled in water, all manner of active ingredients apart from the target property are released and mingled into the dose. Our reductionist ideology wants to reduce everything to one solitary potency but that’s never the way plants work. I caught my GP scanning through his computer during a consultation when suddenly the Gemini AI symbol appeared. I challenged him gently over it and he confessed immediately that he often uses AI as an aid. That’s only OK as long as you can absolutely trust the veracity of the data it’s working with.
AI can accomplish in seconds what folk traditions take decades or even centuries to establish and prove – and that’s a good thing. What’s lost is the sense of connection to the sources and the loss of deep experience in building connections.