Longdown · Exeter · Devon

Sleep in a Romany wagon over a hundred years old, ten minutes from Exeter

Romany Ri is a Romany heritage site and campsite at Longdown, with an onsite museum, restored bow top wagons you can stay in, and pitches for tents and touring caravans.

Ring Clarence 07506 422985

Clarence Ware is your host and he is on site. The telephone is the way to reach him.

Where Longdown, near Exeter Ten minutes from the city centre, twenty from Dartmoor.
Three ways to stay Wagon, tent or caravan A restored bow top, your own tent, or hard standing with electricity.
On site A Romany museum Genuine bow top wagons and Romany artefacts on display.
Your host Clarence Ware From a travelling family, and a historian.

What this place is

A heritage site you can stay the night on

Romany Ri sits at Springdale Farm on Bondhouse Lane at Longdown, a few minutes west of Exeter. It is a Romany heritage site first and a campsite second, and the two are not separate things. The wagons you can book a night in are the same restored bow tops the site exists to look after.

A vardo is a traditional Romani living wagon. A bow top is the kind with a canvas tilt stretched over hooped ash, the type most associated with Romany families travelling in England and Wales. Kushti is the Romani word for good, which is where the other name this place goes by, Kushti Vardos, comes from.

Clarence Ware is your host and he is on site. He is from a travelling family and a proud historian, and he will show you how meals were cooked over the fire if you would like to learn. If you want the background before you arrive, start with what a vardo actually is.

Your host, Clarence Ware, is onsite and offers an amazing opportunity to learn more about the traditional way of the Travelers as he, himself, is from a traveling family and a proud historian.

Romany Ri, in its own words

Three ways to stay

Pick the one that suits you

A restored bow top wagon

Wagons over a hundred years old, all lovingly restored.

Each pitch has its own kitchenette with a gas cooker, and a private seating area outside. Firepits raised off the ground and barbecues are available, and ten gallons of fresh drinking water are delivered to every pitch each day. One of the wagons is called Maggie’s Wagon.
What staying in a wagon is like
Your own tent

Spacious pitches, clean toilets and showers.

Bring your own tent and use the shower block, the toilets, the washing-up area and the car park. The kitchenette, the firepits and the daily water delivery apply to camping pitches too.
How the camping field works
A caravan on hard standing

Hard standings with electricity on site.

Bring your own touring caravan and park on the hard standing. Electricity is on site and available, and you have the same shower block, washing-up area and car park as everyone else.
The hard standings and electric hook-up

The museum

A Romany museum, on the site you are staying on

There is a Romany museum here, with genuine bow top wagons and Romany artefacts on display.

It is not an attraction bolted onto a campsite. The collection is the reason the place exists, and Clarence, who keeps it, is a historian from a travelling family rather than a curator who read about one.

If you have never met the word before: a vardo is a horse-drawn Romani living wagon, and the wagons were built and painted by hand, chamfered to save weight and lined out in gold. We have written the whole thing up properly, including the main wagon types and how they were painted.

Read what a vardo actually is