A Time from the World

Rowena Farre led a double life while studying art in London as a young woman. For months on end she would disappear to Scotland or the English-Welsh borderlands, where she lived as part of a Gypsy community. Here she met different kinds of travellers – tramps and mumpers, tinkers and didikais, and the enigmatic Romanies – all living on the fringes of society. She found it an uncertain existence of hard work and modest means, fruit-picking, labouring on farms, hawking goods from village to village. But she also found a life of rewarding friendships, unusual freedom, and even love.

Written by a woman who refused to acknowledge the social divisions that keep us apart, A Time From the World is an intimate account of a nomadic culture that is repeatedly sensationalised, glamourised, demonised, and just plain misunderstood. Rowena Farre was a remarkable woman, a traveller in the truest sense, whose life was driven by an enduring curiosity in her fellow human beings.