Wildlife haven bulldozed by suspected travellers in bank holiday ‘land grab’
31st August 2026
Suspected travellers have bulldozed a wildlife haven in an alleged bank holiday land grab.
Heavy machinery was used to destroy the field in the town of Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, over the weekend.
The unauthorised work in Sheering Mill Lane began early on Saturday morning, apparently to clear space for mobile homes, and prompted an angry response from residents.
Hundreds of people protested as diggers tore up the “wildlife hotspot” and builders installed fencing.
The work was carried out without planning permission and has since led to the council successfully appealing to the High Court for an injunction to halt all construction.
Councillor Greg Rattey, a former Sawbridgeworth mayor, said residents were dismayed by the “illegal settlement” that he said had been “built by travellers”.
Itinerant groups are communities that travel habitually from place to place rather than living in one permanent location. The origins of the traditionally itinerant groups in Europe are not always clear. The largest of these groups is the Romani people (also known as Roma or Gypsies, with the latter being increasingly taken as derogatory). They left India around 1,500 years ago, entering Europe around 1,000 years ago via the Balkans. They include the Sinti people, the second largest group. Travellers, assumed to have begun travelling from necessity during the early modern period, are unrelated to the Romani, and are assumed not to be ethnically distinct from their source population. However, recent DNA testing has shown that the Irish Travellers are of Irish origin but are genetically distinct from their settled counterparts due to social isolation, and more groups are being studied. The third largest group in Europe is the Yenish, an indigenous Germanic group.
Many itinerant groups speak their own language or dialect, though with outsiders they will use the language of the surrounding settled population. Such insider languages are often a blend of the regional settled language and Romani language, but sometimes a cant based on a regional language without Romani influence. As opposed to nomads, who travel with and subsist on herds of livestock, itinerant groups traditionally travel for trade or other work for the sedentary populations amongst which they live.