Michael is 17 years old, Angela is 16; they are travellers. They are Irish tinkers, reluctantly married to each other. When they are sent to the north of Ireland to buy radios and other goods for smuggling into the "Free State", they are thrown into intimate contact with each other for the first time. Crashing their borrowed van, Michael goes for help and, on impulse when the opportunity presents itself, robs a post office. On the road home through the landscape, the ruins, the historical past, they make fumbling attempts at intimacy.

Traveller presents a view of a dark, morose and poverty-stricken Ireland. Its poverty is not only physical but mental, epitomized by two silent young people, thrown together during a journey from South to North and back. As it slowly goes awry, what takes over is a series of events somewhat reminiscent of the happenings in Wim Wenders' early films, where characters and incidents appear and occur without explanation. This is an unusual setting to apply those methods, placing them in a world where the filmmaker claims "an ancient, intimate and dark connection exists between murder and politics."