Mynydd Epynt, 1940

In the spring of 1940 the War Office served notice on the farms of Mynydd Epynt. They had until the summer to go.

The usual figures are fifty-four farms and around two hundred people. The land became the Sennybridge Training Area, and it still is. Live firing continues on it most weeks of the year.

What was there

Epynt is high, rounded, wet ground between the Usk and the Irfon, the sort of country that looks empty from a road and is not. It carried hill farms, mostly sheep, worked by families who had been on the same holdings for generations. It had a chapel, Y Babell. It had a drovers' inn. It was, and this is the part that matters, almost entirely Welsh-speaking, at the western edge of a language boundary that had been retreating eastward to westward for two centuries.

The clearance removed the community in a single season. Some families were rehoused nearby; many were not, and dispersed. The chapel was abandoned. The language line moved several miles west and did not move back.

Why it is not just a wartime story

Requisition was common in 1940 and much of it was temporary. Epynt was not returned. The Ministry of Defence still holds around 31,000 acres, and the training area is one of the largest in Britain.

That makes Epynt something more awkward than a war memory. It is a permanent alteration to the human geography of Powys, carried out by the state, on a Welsh-speaking population, and it has never had the public reckoning that the drowning of Capel Celyn in the 1960s eventually got. It is better known in Welsh than in English, which tells you something about who has been doing the remembering.

What survives

Ruined farmsteads across the range, most of them recorded on Coflein and none of them accessible without permission. Y Babell chapel has been restored and is used for occasional services. There is a memorial at the Drovers' Arms.

The Epynt Way, a permissive bridleway, runs a circuit around the perimeter of the training area — around forty miles of it — and is the only legal way for most people to see the ground. Access is controlled and depends on firing schedules. Check before going, and take the red flags seriously.