Northumbrian pipe maker Jim Bryan. DA3117P5A MELANCHOLIC siren starts up and transports the listener into another world - it is a beautiful, haunting sound.

"I shan't forget when I first heard the pipes," says the creator of the resonance, Jimmy Bryan. "I was in Scotland, in a woodland and I had dozed off when something woke me.

"It was the seductive sound of these pipes, which I followed down to a lakeside where a man was sitting, playing them.

"I fell in love with them and have never looked back."

We aren't in a Scottish woodland now, but behind the BP garage on the Bishopdown Farm estate, Salisbury, and despite the less romantic setting, it's easy to see how Jimmy (73) fell under the spell of the Northumbrian smallpipe.

In fact, he is partly responsible for bringing it back from the edge of extinction.

He and a fellow enthusiast put together a book, 'The Northern Bagpipes', an easy to follow instruction manual on how to make the historic instrument. Historic it certainly is.

Jimmy says that they used to carve pigs playing the pipes on the underside of choir stalls and there is a bagpiper on a roof boss in Winchester Cathedral if you care to crane your neck back and look.

Henry VIII had a set of the pipes, which is recorded on the inventory at Hampton Court.

"The 1800s were a great time for bagpipes," says Jimmy. "Things really got going and they did all sorts of wonderful things with pipes then."

However, then interest waned.

"There were only seven players left when we wrote the book," says Jimmy, "and now there are over 600.

"There has been a huge revival.

"There are pipers from all over now, they keep on coming out of the woodwork."

When he wrote his book in 1972, Jimmy was an engineer in Newcastle, and an antiquarian at the Blackgate museum, Newcastle.

He was also teaching night classes for the local adult education authority, something he continues to do at Salisbury U3A.

"One of my pupils was a police officer at Wilton and they were replacing all the old truncheons," he says. "Instead of handing them over and throwing them away they gave them to me, and they have been used to make the chanter of the pipe.

"Truncheons are made from hardwood and that is ideal for making this instrument."

Jimmy likes to use as much recycled material as possible and handcrafts the smallpipe keys from old cutlery and even uses snooker balls for the instrument's white ends.

A simple set of smallpipes consists of bellows, a bag with three drones and a plain chanter capable of playing one octave.

A new set is worth around £450.

Jimmy does all his handiwork in the garden shed where he has his workshop - a place, according to his wife Marion, where he can disappear for hours.

"It's every man's dream," says Jimmy. "Each set of pipes takes around 150 hours of labour but I don't make them to sell, they're just for my grandchildren and so on."

Jimmy moved to Salisbury to be near his daughter and grandchildren.

Now he finds himself in demand to play at Burns Nights and the like, and his own birthday celebrations are great occasions to get an ad hoc band of pipers and violinists from across the south to come and play.

Before moving here, he and Marion spent 14 years living on a yacht, at sea, having left their home city of Newcastle. But he didn't neglect his pipes. They were a great companion in his fourteen years on the water, as he shared cultural exchanges with Spanish and Greek pipers when he got to port.

"They open many doors, these pipes," he says.

Doors to Edinburgh University are no exception apparently.

"My claim to fame is that I'm the only Englishman ever to lecture the Scots on bagpipes," says Jimmy, his eyes twinkling.