“In mid Wales, in the United Kingdom, in an area of mountains and moorland with soft grassy soil where thousands of sheep graze, where it rains often and the weather is severe, there is a place that does not appear on google maps. It is a military training camp.
With the outbreak of World War II, the British government urgently needed additional land and facilities for artillery training and practice – a large remote area where war ammunition and explosives could be used. They chose Mynydd Epynt in Wales, a place where a community of 214 people lived, and were evicted. Now, Mynydd Epynt is a so-called ‘impact zone’ – a no man’s land where artillery has been fired and used for sixty years, whose moist grassy soil has absorbed the impact of shells without forming craters. Under normal circumstances, this is the most dangerous place in Wales, where even the army fears to tread.
Of places like this my friend Mike Pearson said: They are places resistant to any scenario or program, perhaps only susceptible to concept, to idea: to the truly hypothetical, to the projection of speculations and dreams and imaginings into places we can never visit.“
From my time living in rural Wales, this is how I remember the sound of the rain, when caught in it outdoors:
* Play all the tracks simultaneously, and adjust the volume as desired.