AAH no, the travellers and Gypsies are coming – lock up your village greens and indeterminate grassed areas.

Communities have different approaches to the annual visit of the Romany folk and their allies from Ireland and elsewhere as they pass through on their way to Appleby Horse Fair.

I've done a survey while driving past, hoping the lashed together engine will make it home. In Masham, Middleham and Leyburn, they're fairly relaxed.

"Stay a while and wonder among our traditional Dales charms, or go to the pub and have a few drinks," their attitude seems to say. In these places, access to grassed areas is generally not restricted. The travelling folk have pitched up, lit their fires, tethered their horses and a festival-like atmosphere has broken out, thankfully minus the juggling, people on stilts and stalls selling burgers for £10.

In Kirkby Stephen, they had gone for wooden stakes and polite notices in some places, and rocks and ropes in others. It's fair to say the stakes and notices had failed to do the trick and have been generally ignored. Perhaps they were not polite enough.

In Bainbridge, they have adopted a zero tolerance approach with wire preventing the visitors from driving on to the green. The measures are now taken after thousands of pounds of damage was caused to the public toilets a couple of years ago. Some suggested the vandalism was the fault of a coach load of pensioners from Abergavenny on a walking holiday in the area who had become disorientated and distressed by all the neon lights, but others blame the scores of travellers who set up on the village green. What a superb word "scores" is. A reporter's best friend – not a clue whether there was 25 or 250, but there were certainly "scores".

During the problems in Bainbridge in 2013, the police were called, although one officer found herself ensuring the children using the play equipment on the village green queued nicely, apparently. Personally, I quite enjoy the annual passing through of the travellers – the shaggy-haired horses, the pretty pained wooden caravans, the large modern caravans pulled by executive cars and expensive 4x4s. It's tradition, don't you know.