Moorland before me stretched out like a dream

Sometime around 1981 a friend of a friend played me an LP by a band called Mr Fox, a folk-rock band that had a brief moment in the sun before falling into popular obscurity. The album, first released in 1971, was called The Gipsy and, although I wasn’t sure about most of it, I loved the title track which I copied to a cassette and then obsessed over for a while. Over the years elements of the tune would come back to me as earworms, usually whenever I heard mention of Wensleydale because of the opening couplet of one of the verses:

So next morning I took the road into Wensleydale.
Moorland before me stretched out like a dream.

I listened to them again just before Christmas on Spotify and immediately bought a cd which brings together their only two albums. While a couple of the tracks have dated, for the most part this remains vital music. Like most of the ‘folk-rock’ of that period the material which I most like now is that which sticks closest to the tradition and Mr. Fox were steeped in the Yorkshire Dales.

The song “The Gipsy” tells of a bloke who meets a gipsy girl in the pub and, after a few months, decides to propose to her. When he gets to her place her dad tells him that she left that morning for Scotland in a caravan. He follows her from Bradford, through the Yorkshire Dales and over Buttertubs to Keld by Thwaite. I hadn’t thought too much about this until I saw a thread on Mudcat that discussed walking the route.

I haven’t been able to get that idea out of my head for a couple of days now. I’m not sure when I’d find time to do it, but the idea seems sound. Some of the interest is tangential: a distant relative, George Weston, married a Romany named Julia in, I think, 1900 although I haven’t tracked them down yet. I know almost nothing about them but I’ve always wanted to know more. Walking this route won’t help with that knowledge but it makes a connection somewhere in my head.

The song is on YouTube. I tried to upload a better recording to Soundcloud but it wouldn’t let me for rights reasons (so much for ‘fair use’), so here’s the You Tube link : Mr Fox, The Gipsy.