BRITAIN's 'top 100' eccentrics are being celebrated in London today. But, as Mike Buckingham reports, the cream of the crop is right here in Gwent.

There is a Cwmbran family which believes that Venusian flying saucers wait until all customers have gone home and then use supermarket car parks as landing pads. How they manage now we have 24-hour shopping is not explained.

The estimable Kevin Briggs, of Caldicot, is absorbed by wartime pill boxes. What the rest of us see as ugly intrusions into the landscape he sees as rivalling the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren.

At the drop of a hat he'll show you a half-hour video of his passion - a camera trained on a pill box with no movement whatsoever.

A mechanically-inclined gentleman living not that far from Usk has invested a fortune in what he calls "feet first travel", designing and making motorcycles in which the rider sits in a chair arrangement with the handlebar behind his knees. Few have been seen on the road but he is undeterred.

Gwent is a happy hunting ground for unusual folk with unusual passions. Sometimes, though, eccentrics are mere fantasists, whose energies are dissipated in a vapour of self-delusion.

To this argument Gwent can reply with just three words: Doctor Russell Rhys. Once Caerleon's GP, Dr Rhys, who although in his 70s wears his hair in a pigtail and espouses a vaguely communistic doctrine, is convinced that one day King Arthur and his knights will return and come to the aid of Wales during the time of her greatest tribulation.

The fact that King Arthur and his warriors did not rouse from their slumber at the time of the opening of the National Assembly has not deterred the good doctor from carving enormous thrones to receive them. At first there was one throne for Arthur, and then another for Guinevere, his wife.

Now, huge thrones, wreathed in carved ravens and chalices, swords and horses and rats and other objects threaten to overwhelm the Ffwrwm at Caerleon, a place set aside for their display.

Eccentric? Possibly. But the sheer scale of the enterprise and the originality of Dr Rhys's vision brings visitors and revenue to Gwent.

A man capable of such ideas is not one to be trifled with, indeed not.

FRED NEVER DISMAYED FOR LONG

I SHALL not distinguish between extant free-thinkers and those who are no longer with us. This article is by way of a requiem for Mr Fred Jackson, of Lliswerry, Newport, inventor of the heat transference engine.

While taking part in the seaborne invasion of North Africa during the Second World War, and while more orthodox minds were on what sort of welcome the Germans might have laid on, Mr Jackson was solemnly studying the flying fish.

Despite being as I recall, a corporal, Mr Jackson had no hesitation in dashing off a letter to the Allied high command suggesting that sea-skimming invasion barges be built to transport troops ashore in future amphibious operations. He was thanked for his interest but told that professional engineers considered this to be unworkable. It was with some satisfaction that two decades later Mr Jackson saw the introduction of the hovercraft for military use.

The only time I ever saw Fred downcast was when he was perfecting a device which involved all sorts of pressure pads and sensors which would eliminate the embarrassing noises sometimes emanating from toilets.

"Couldn't you just turn a radio on, Fred? Or have soundproofed cubicle walls?" He was not dismayed for long. Within a week he had invented side-loading cargo vessels which would prevent disasters such as the Spirit of Free Enterprise. Unsinkable, was Fred.

LORD TREDEGAR AND HIS PEEKING PARROT

ANY review of Gwent eccentricity would be incomplete without a mention of the Lords and Ladies Tredegar.

Best known, perhaps, is Evan Frederick Morgan, Lord Tredegar, Fourth Baron, Second Viscount, Papal Chamberlain and Ovate of St Mary's Abbey, Buckfast, Devon, and renowned for keeping a parrot down his trousers.

Lord Tredegar from 1934 until 1945, Evan was much given to high living and exotic animals of which he had a multifarious collection, including a blue hyacinth macaw, which he would carry on his shoulders, a honey-bear, a boxing kangaroo called Somerset, who had been rescued from a travelling circus and who would, upon occasions, spar with visitors.

Evan was notorious for the garden parties he used to host which would be attended by such luminaries as Aldous Huxley and H G Wells and on several occasions Aleister Crowley, the well-known Satanist.

Once, while visiting a pet fair, Evan heard an exotic bird salesman bemoaning the fact that a parakeet he had bought wouldn't say anything.

With the optimism that is a feature of great eccentrics Evan purchased the bird and trained it to climb up the inside of his trouser leg, unbutton his fly from the inside, poke his head out and squawk.

Evan's mother, Katherine, sat in a huge bird's nest of her own construction while receiving visitors.

There are other eccentrics, alive and dead. Space does not permit me to take you into the world of the gentleman who hikes around Gwent's countryside with a rucksack-full of bird boxes and the woman who is teaching her horse German, but I feel the case is proven.

Eccentrics have been, are, and God willing, always will be a part of the glory of Gwent.