I WAS interested to read your report (April 30) detailing attitude that the village folk of Great Gidding have towards the travellers who occasionally use a council-owned grass verge to camp on, while at the same time including a whole supplement devoted

I WAS interested to read your report (April 30) detailing attitude that the village folk of Great Gidding have towards the travellers who occasionally use a council-owned grass verge to camp on, while at the same time including a whole supplement devoted towards guiding people on how to reduce their carbon footprint.

It is a given that people who live in caravans will have a much smaller carbon footprint than those who live in houses, and the larger the house the bigger the carbon footprint.

So travellers should get a big pat on the back for living a much more sustainable lifestyle than most of the permanent residents of Great Gidding and probably the whole UK. In the longer term, sustaining human life on the planet is a more pressing problem than any amount of rubbish that human beings dump.

With regard to the rubbish, the problem the residents of Great Gidding have is one of concealment rather than the moral issue they insinuate. If three months of any one of their households' rubbish were piled next to that which the travellers left behind, I am certain that the travellers' pile would pale in comparison.

What they lack is a suitable arrangement with the council to collect their waste, considering the lifestyle they lead. The permanent residents of Great Gidding are bound by their Council Tax agreements to pay for the council to remove their rubbish and dump it somewhere else (often on someone else's doorstep - plenty of people live near rubbish dumps). However, dumped it is - it does not disappear into thin air.

It seems to me that, while many demonstrations of prejudice have been successfully quashed by awareness campaigns and promotion of humanitarian attitudes, the condemnation of travellers seems to have a free reign, and it is all right to make huge generalisations about their "thieving" and "dirty" ways.

Whatever the concerns of the people of Great Gidding are about their infrequent visitors, they should not be so quick to point the finger and consider that there are always positives and negatives in every choice.

Theirs is low rubbish nuisance and high carbon footprint, while the travellers' is high rubbish nuisance but low carbon footprint (and it would be lower if they weren't moved on as often).

JUDY NEWLOVE

The Brambles

St Ives