The Army in Powys

Somewhere upwards of 31,000 acres of Powys is a firing range. Live rounds go down it most weeks of the year, and it has been that way since 1940.

For a county that markets itself on emptiness and quiet, that is a substantial thing to leave out, and most heritage writing about Powys does leave it out.

Before the modern army

There has been a garrison at Brecon, on and off, since the Romans put cavalry at Y Gaer around AD 75. The Normans built at the confluence. The county militias trained through the eighteenth century.

The modern arrangement dates from the Cardwell and Childers reforms of the 1870s and 1880s, which tied infantry regiments to fixed county depots. Brecon became the depot of the 24th Regiment of Foot, later the South Wales Borderers.

That is why the medals from Rorke's Drift are in Brecon. In January 1879, during the Zulu War, a company of the 24th held a mission station against a far larger force and eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for the action, the most for a single engagement in British military history. The regimental museum in Brecon holds the material, and the way it presents an imperial war has changed considerably over the last two decades, which is itself worth noticing.

Epynt

In spring 1940 the War Office cleared Mynydd Epynt. Around fifty-four holdings and some two hundred people were removed in a single season. Unlike most wartime requisition, it was never given back.

That is dealt with at length on its own page, because it deserves it. The point here is that the training area which resulted is not a historical episode. It is the current, working reason why a large part of central Powys is inaccessible.

Sennybridge now

The Sennybridge Training Area is one of the largest in Britain and is used year-round, principally for infantry field training. The Infantry Battle School operates from Dering Lines at Brecon, running section and platoon commanders' courses.

The special forces selection marches over the Bannau Brycheiniog are the part the public hears about, usually when something goes wrong. Three soldiers died of heat illness on a selection march in July 2013, and the resulting inquest and prosecution changed how the exercises are run.

The wider estate

Beyond Epynt, the Second World War left a scatter of installations across the county that are easy to miss.

Airfields and satellite landing grounds, mostly grass, mostly returned to farmland with a control tower or a hut base surviving in a field corner. Prisoner of war camps, of which Powys had several, generally recorded on Coflein and generally unmarked on the ground. Ammunition storage in disused quarries and railway tunnels. Anti-invasion works along the Severn.

The Royal Ordnance factory at Pembrey is outside the county but drew workers from it, as did the aircraft factories in the midlands, and the wartime movement of labour out of rural Powys is part of the depopulation story.

Why it belongs in a heritage resource

Three reasons.

It is the largest single act of state-directed change to human settlement in modern Powys. Nothing else in the twentieth century moved as many people off land they held.

It is why particular ground is inaccessible, and anyone planning to walk in central Powys needs to know that before they set out rather than after.

And the archaeology within the training area is remarkable precisely because it has not been ploughed, built on or improved since 1940. Coflein records prehistoric and medieval sites on Epynt in a state of preservation that would be unthinkable on working farmland. The clearance destroyed a community and, incidentally, froze everything underneath it.

Access

The Epynt Way is a permissive bridleway of around forty miles circling the perimeter of the training area, and it is the only legal access for most people. It depends on the firing schedule, which is published.

Red flags mean live firing. Take them seriously, do not pick anything up, and do not cross the boundary.