A Journey Through Gypsy Britain

The Stopping Places

A journey through Gypsy Britain with a dazzling new writer and native son of the Romany community

Tender and intensely lyrical ... the prose is pure delight. The author breathes life into everything he sees ... To read The Stopping Places is to better understand the curious history of the Roma and how they have survived into 21st-century Britain

A beautiful writer who seems born to tell this fascinating story. It's brilliantly researched, avoiding stereotype and explaining misconceptions, while showing what is vital and special about modern traveller culture

A fine prose style, vividly conjuring the smell of a hop pillow, the whinnying of a horse fair and the ‘wet-look hairstyles’ of the men, as well as the dead cold of a wagon in winter... An element of memoir clings to this excellent account of folk most of us don’t understand... The end of the book hints at redemption, as Le Bas comes to terms with the conflicts of his dual world. But he is too good a writer to make a meal of it

An insight into the hidden world and culture of travelling people, written with delicacy and affection

Beautifully written and deeply affecting… While this is a beautiful, important book about Gypsy culture, it’s also a moving exploration of what it means to belong

An illuminating journey into a British culture and landscape about which most of us know nothing. This is a beautiful, important and revelatory book from a graceful new voice

Le Bas is a thoughtful writer, observant of nature and with a lovely turn of phrase... by turn lyrical, edgy and wistful... the book is rich with lore and history

I loved Damian Le Bas’s beautiful, questioning memoir, at once an introduction into a hidden world and a profound meditation on belonging and difference

He conjures up soaring, poetic descriptions of his surroundings... But The Stopping Places is more than a travelogue. It is also a colourful dive into gypsy culture, history and language... The Stopping Places is an enjoyable and enlightening account of an overlooked part of British society

A delicate description of a life split between two identities... Le Bas has a cinematic writing style that shifts between images, memory and history. He deftly traces the origins of his people, the language and persecutions as well as modern British hypocrisies... This is a thoroughly enjoyable read that manages a near-perfect balance of the personal and political

The Stopping Places is a beautiful book about belonging: both a map of a secret landscape and a rich, thoughtful memoir of a divided life. Damian Le Bas is the perfect guide to this often-overlooked geography. He is a scholar-Gypsy whose writing is lyrical, informed, and deeply humane

This book moves at the pace of a horse pulling a Gypsy wagon. It’s wonderful. Slow down and relax as Damian takes you on his year-long journey seeking out the places in the UK – the atchin tans - where his people, the Romany Gypsies, have stopped, worked, lived, loved and fought since time immemorial. It’s a delicate balance between romance and history, information and folklore, language, history, keen observations of people, deep love of nature , the minutiae of daily routine and glimpses into his own personal life, all in easy prose that frequently slips into poetry. A breath of very fresh air

In The Stopping Places, Damian Le Bas takes us on a fascinating journey through Gypsy Britain. Full of spark, tenderness and lyricism, this beautiful book reveals to us a world still largely secret, complex with enchantment and unease, rich language and blood ties, rough weather and shining poetry. Le Bas is a wonderful guide, open-hearted and curious, always respectful, as he ventures into the past and present of his own community, seeking what it means to roam and to belong

The book is consistently both enjoyable and eye-opening – a real achievement

This enthralling, eye-opening and beautifully written book takes the form of an odyssey through Gypsy Britain and its history

The book resulting from Le Bas’s decision to know this roots better is a remarkable, deeply humane, utterly engaging and elegiac one

Damian Le Bas is a writer, filmmaker and visual artist. His first book The Stopping Places won the Somerset Maugham Award, a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Damian is widely published as a journalist and poet and has taught for the Arvon foundation. A recipient of a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, he is a member of the European Film Academy, holds a First Class degree in Theology from the University of Oxford, and was awarded an honorary Master of Education by the University of Chichester. Besides getting in the sea he loves music, walking and spending time in the woods and hills with his family and friends. The Drowned Places is his second book.

'I needed to get to the stopping places, so I needed to get on the road. It was the road where I might at last find out where I belonged.' 
 
Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places they worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lores of their people. 
 
In a bid to better understand his heritage, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today. 
 
‘A beautiful writer who seems born to tell this fascinating story’ Amy Liptrot 
 
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award 
Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize

Damian Le Bas

Beautifully written…The Drowned Places is one of the best books on diving that I have ever read

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer… I've read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

A very good book. THE book about diving I couldn’t find a few years ago: giving both the technicalities and the wonder

Loss, risk, adventure and redemption. Le Bas has written the most compelling and evocative of underwater odysseys

KATE HUMBLE, author of A Year of Living Simply

An enthralling exploration of the liminal by one of the most exciting writers around. A breathtakingly good book

TRISTAN GOOLEY, author of How to Read a Tree

The most captivating book on diving that I have ever read. But it is not about diving as a sport; it is about diving as an accessway to submerged landscapes, the festival of life that inhabits them and, above all, the drowned ruins of lost civilisations

MENSUN BOUND, author of The Ship Beneath the Ice

Le Bas goes on a compelling dual journey in this book, both historical and personal. His curiosity brings the ancient myths and stark realities of the ocean vividly to life. A various, rich exploration

SOPHIE ELMHIRST, author of Maurice and Maralyn

I loved this book - a wonderful interweaving of diving and exploration with coming to terms with grief, beautifully written and endlessly fascinating. One of the best books that I have read in a long time

DAVID GIBBINS, author of A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

A powerful and superbly profound book where myth and history meet personal journey through the prism of diving

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer and his diving adventures are immersively told. I’ve read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

Diving in Search of Atlantis

'Literary and learned. It goes deep' AMY LIPTROT 
'The most compelling and evocative of underwater odysseys' KATE HUMBLE 
'The most captivating book on diving that I have ever read' MENSUN BOUND 
 
Damian Le Bas explores the meaning we find in sunken ruins around the world in this spellbinding love letter to diving. 
 
Thousands of years ago, an island off the Straits of Gibraltar went to war with ancient Athens. The battle was lost, and an earthquake cleaved the land in two. Overnight the island sank beneath the waves – or so legend tells. 
 
As a young boy, Damian Le Bas was captivated by the story of the lost city of Atlantis. As an adult, he dreams of diving to discover its ruins. After the death of his father, torn between his lifelong desire and the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he comes by chance across a dive shop. He can’t help but go in. 
 
Under the waves, Damian enters a breathtaking world. As he masters the skills of this exhilarating sport, diving with seals in the Farne Islands, exploring submerged Roman ruins in Naples and mapping the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica, he is entranced anew, by wonders both man-made and natural. 
 
Plato's writings on Atlantis were a parable about the hubris of humankind; in witnessing our effects on oceans and ocean communities, Damian finds echoes of this in the modern world.

Damian Le Bas

Praise for The Drowned Places

Beautifully written…The Drowned Places is one of the best books on diving that I have ever read

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer… I've read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

A very good book. THE book about diving I couldn’t find a few years ago: giving both the technicalities and the wonder

Beautifully written…The Drowned Places is one of the best books on diving that I have ever read

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer… I've read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

A very good book. THE book about diving I couldn’t find a few years ago: giving both the technicalities and the wonder

Beautifully written…The Drowned Places is one of the best books on diving that I have ever read

Le Bas is a fine, vivid writer… I've read few better descriptions of the contradictions of the sport, its wonder and its terror, its grace and its absurdity

A very good book. THE book about diving I couldn’t find a few years ago: giving both the technicalities and the wonder

Books by Damian Le Bas

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