Stop all the clocks: Country fairs – in pictures

When summer comes, the urban majority like to venture beyond the city limits to see what the countryside has to offer. And the countryside obliges its day visitors and weekenders by putting on a show, with the emphasis on rustic quaintness. → Photograph: Gary Calton

For a couple of months, it’s hard to move for all the flower festivals, village fetes, gymkhanas, dog shows, craft fairs, vintage car rallies, field dances, beer bazaars and antiques fairs, not to mention car boot sales. → Photograph: Gary Calton

In Yorkshire, country shows are a bit different. Visitors are tolerated, even welcomed at times, and at the bigger corporate events – the Great Yorkshire Show, for instance – they come from miles around, a courageous handful from over the county border. → Photograph: Gary Calton

But the smaller shows are run by local people for local people, as a fun day out, a rest from school or fieldwork, and an assertion of community identity. Animals are much in evidence, since it’s through animals that the locals make their living. And everyone attends, whether young or old, rich or poor, aristocrat or peasant. As the most important event in the calendar, the annual show is not to be missed. → Photograph: Gary Calton

The photographer Gary Calton was very struck by these shows when he moved to the North Yorkshire moors five years ago. After Sheffield (where he was born), London (where he’d lived) and Africa, Russia, Japan and the US (where he’d worked and travelled), he was experiencing the British countryside close-up for the first time. Keen to observe and understand, he took his camera with him to a large show in Harrogate, as well as to shows closer to home in Ryedale and Rosedale. → Photograph: Gary Calton

What his photos capture is a sense of timeless­ness, emphasised by the use of black and white. In one, a ponytailed girl is glimpsed through the windscreen of an old car: it could be America in the 1930s, not Yorkshire in the 21st century. → Photograph: Gary Calton

Sheep wander in and out of almost every picture, just as they wander freely on the moors: one photo has two clusters of sheep separated by a metal gate, those in the foreground newly shorn, those behind them on the brink (we assume) of losing their fleeces. In the Ridings, sheep-shearing competitions are as common as sheepdog trials. → Photograph: Gary Calton

Country shows may be appealingly collectivist and democratic, as farm hands rub shoulders with landowners, but they’re also fiercely competitive. Children learn this when taking part in wheel­barrow and egg-and-spoon races. And for farmers showing off livestock in the parade ring, there’s the chance to win rosettes and add to the value of their bloodline. → Photograph: Gary Calton

In the marquees are tables of produce, exhibitions of paintings, and cages of poultry and rabbits, all vying for a prize. Unlike auction marts, the shows aren’t about buying and selling. But behind the games and fancy dress. they’re a serious business. Young farmers used to find their wives here, and though the barrels in the beer tent are metal rather than wood these days, the spirit of romance is far from dead. → Photograph: Gary Calton

Of course, rural practices and traditions in Yorkshire are changing: shepherds ride round on quad bikes with mobile phones clamped to their ear, and many hills are populated by wind turbines. But country shows celebrate a way of life that still goes on and that we’ll be the poorer for should it disappear. “Let it always be there,” Philip Larkin prays at the end of his poem Show Saturday, and Gary Calton’s photographs echo the same sentiment. Photograph: Gary Calton