NOBBY Dew wasn't born a gipsy, but he really wouldn't have minded if he had been.

His heart and soul have carried a touch of the Romany for a long time and the craggy face and knotted neckerchief just add to the image.

But his caravans are the give-away.

Nobby has gipsy caravans in his front garden like some folk have gnomes. Currently there are six of them, works of art that he has either built himself from scratch or renovated from a run-down condition.

They stand alongside the country lane that winds between the hamlets of Leigh and Alfrick Pound, in the even smaller hamlet of Stitchins Hill. Blink and you'll miss it, but few people do, because Nobby's caravans catch the eye like a streaker.

For tourists from foreign lands in search of rural colour down the by-ways, they are a Godsend. Continentals, Americans, both North and South, and even Russians have popped their heads over Nobby's gate to see what's cooking.

The man himself talks so fast with the words tumbling over each other, sometimes in not quite the order they left his brain, that it's a wonder anyone not used to him understands a thing.

Halfway through our chat, his wife Marjorie, a finely coiffured lady who looked as though she'd be about as much at home in a caravan as the late Queen Mother, emerged from their near-by cottage bearing tea and biscuits.

"Has he talked you to death, yet?" she enquired. "No? Well, can you understand anything?"

I replied I was trying hard.

For a man who likes nothing better than sitting by the warm stove among the cosy and very colourful surroundings of his caravans, Nobby Dew had a fairly ordinary start to life.

He was born in a house at Sinton Green, a village about five miles north-west of Worcester.

"As a lad I used to help with the hops on Pudge's farm at Northingtown," he said. "That's when I first saw the gipsies. Oh, they lived in a different world.

"I was fascinated by their caravans and their horses and their whole way of life. They were a proud people in those days. Proper Romanies..

"Pudge's hadn't got any facilities for hop drying at Northingtown and so they used to cart the hops over to their main farm at Bishop's Frome (a journey of nearly 20 miles) to be dried there.

"One day, I managed to get a lift on one of the hop carts and I'll never forget the sight as I came down the hill to Bishop's Frome. In a field were all the gipsy caravans, there must have been 50 of them or more, all pulled into a circle with the horses running loose in the middle. These horses were all the colours of the rainbow. It was magnificent to see.

"When the caravans moved from place to place, the foals used to run free alongside.

"And the dogs.

"If ever you went to a gipsy camp, they'd never let you get near the wagons."

Sadly, for Nobby, the Romany life was not for him.

"As soon as I left Hallow School at the age of 14, I was given my hob nail boots and told to find a proper job."

Which he did, spending much of his life in the building trade.

But the love of the open road and the smell of the caravan stove never left him and, in the early 1980s, he acquired his first horse-drawn dray from an old chap in Malvern who used to tour the local restaurants loading it with scraps for his pigs.

You'd never recognise it now. The once dilapidated caravan is now a work of art. Finished in bright reds and yellows and greens, it stands with all the others in front of his cottage.

One of his purchases, an 1887 Bradford Wagon he bought from the Home Counties through the pages of no less a publication than Horse and Hound, while a 1905 Ledge Wagon came from Much Wenlock. The rest he has made himself, crafting away in the wonderful clutter of his amazing garden workshop.

For a while, Nobby kept horses to pull his caravans on sunny summer days. But that's stopped now, which, if one tale is true, is probably just as well.

"One day I was coming back through Alfrick when Barker (John Barker, licensee of the The Swan) leans out of his window and shouts, 'Nobby, your horse looks like it could do with a drink'.

" 'Right' says I. 'You give him some beer, proper stuff mind, not your slops, in a bucket and I'll come in and have a few too'.

"As soon as Billy (his Welsh cob) touched that beer, his lips began to quiver. Oh, he loved it.

"Well, I must have been in that pub for quite a while, because by the time I came out Billy had drunk the bucket dry.

"We flew home. The sparks were coming off his hooves like fireworks. We went round those lanes like lightning. Mind you, it was just as well he knew the way back, because I was a bit hazy by then." Nobby needed his sprig of lucky heather that day.