THERE aren’t many communities like it. The homes are arranged in a large circle, cowboy wagon style. There is a feudal overlord, who lives in the biggest Winnebago, and a village elder, who lives in one of the smallest. They have their own generators and water supplies and on the edge of the community are the stables where they keep the horses. There are also dogs and cats and a chatter of budgies called Peter, Maurice, Frankie, Percy, Edward and Albert. It is an unusual way to live by any standard, but the people of this travelling village take it for granted. This is how they live and work in the circus.

Today, the Zippos community is in Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, but later this week, it will move again and pitch up in Arbroath before going on to Ayr and Glasgow. The village elder, aka the ringmaster Norman Barrett, usually lives in a house in Blackpool but, like everyone else, he joins the nomadic tribe when the circus is working and lives in a small caravan with his wife. The feudal overlord, aka the circus’s founder and former clown Martin Burton, also lives here for much of the time. When he was a young man, Martin told his parents he would give clowning a go for three years and if it didn’t work out, he would get a proper job. Forty years on, here he is, the boy who ran away and created a circus of his own.

This year, Zippos is celebrating its 30th anniversary and the line-up, as all good circus line-ups should be, is a mix of the familiar and the bizarre. There is a trapeze act, the budgies under the watch of Norman Barrett, performing horses and Roseline and her family of agile, balancing cats. There's also some antics from the new Italian clown Mr Lorenz and comedy from Alex the Fireman. This was Britain’s Got Talent before anyone thought of Britain’s Got Talent.

For some, of course, there is a question to be asked about animal welfare and whether animals should be performing for humans at all. There is also considerable pressure for a ban on wild animals in circuses, although Zippos only features domestic ones. The last time I visited here, one of staff told me about the day she was sitting in her trailer watching the horses in the paddock outside when suddenly they started doing one of their routines. For a few seconds, there they were, in the middle of a field, performing for no-one but themselves. And then they scattered and the show was over and you have to ask yourself: would they do that if they hated it?

In the current line-up of horses, there are two that were rescued from the slaughterhouse by their trainer Boris Borissov and something similar goes for the cats: Junior, who can walk the tightrope, was found as a kitten abandoned in a French shopping centre. Martin Burton also believes his animals have a good life, that the conditions are the best they can be and says Britain should be proud of its strict regulation on welfare. The budgies even have their own trailer.

The budgies’ act is hard to resist and consists of them balancing on little bikes and slides and year after year it’s the act that the audiences love the most. There’s plenty of high stakes drama elsewhere though – the trapeze artist Alex Michael, for example, comes from Brazil and works without a net. Many other nationalities are represented too - there are knife throwers from the Czech Republic and an acrobatic act from Germany that’s called, with the colourful hysteria that the circus does so well, The Wheel of Death.

But there’s something a little surprising about it all. In many ways, this looks like an exotic, peculiar and risque life (which is probably why circus schools, including Martin Burton’s own, are thriving) but it’s also much more traditional than you would expect. Many of the performers are from circus families and were brought up in strong family groups that live together and they are doing the same with their own children. At night, they are exotic and sexy and risk their lives, but during the day, they are traditional and conservative.

Martin Burton says it’s one of the characteristics of the circus he loves and it meant that when his 19-year-old son was a boy, he could let him out to play on his own, something he would never do in a city.

“At the circus, we would open the door and let my son out," he says. "If we couldn’t see him, one of the other adults could and it was a safe place for him to play. Circus people are very conservative with a small c – if you make your living swinging off a trapeze, you will avoid recreational drugs and alcohol because the two don’t mix. The same for a juggler. So they tend to be very traditional and family orientated and at Zippos we celebrate that.”

The sense of mutual co-operation is also strong – the performers and the back-up crew are all expected to muck in, serve coffee and hotdogs or whatever else needs doing. All the children too have their own little job to do in exchange for a fiver in pocket money. The earnings aren’t great these days and there’s not a lot of security – the performers are on annual contracts – but there’s an impressive commitment to the tradition, and colour and excitement of it. My strongest memory is of standing under the bright lights by the side of the ring watching the horses fly round, heads up, eyes wide. And then someone switched on the banner above the door and that word was spelled out in big, bright showbiz letters: CIRCUS.

Zippos is at Stonehaven until tomorrow, Wednesday; Arbroath from July 29-31;

Loch Lomond Shores from August 1-3; Ayr, August 5-7 and Victoria Park, Glasgow from August 9-14. For more information, visit www.scotlandsfavouritecircus.scot