With the Closure of St Athan as a RAF base, the closure of Penally Training camp and the proposed closure of Cawdor Barracks the armed forces are retreating from Wales. This will have a detrimental effect on the RAFAC as places to hold residential training close to where the cadets live are getting less and less.
Also the parent station for most Welsh squadrons is Cosford. This is a six hour 300 mile round trip for me. Its a long was to go to visit MT or pick up some uniform. That is ÂŁ75 on a 1771.
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The cadets can’t use Castlemartin, 20km ish away?
I hear you about the closure of bases in general, but I’m not sure this is the one to be up in arms about.
I know W&W are looking at a place in South Wales to help with this but I’ve not been down to see it yet. Hoping to get a recce in soon and see what facilities are there.
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I’ve tried to book Castlemartin previously. But Booking cell basically said “No chance. Your not a priority user… Have Penally”.
It’s one of those really nice ranges which is always full and busy… And probably has nothing to do with the downtime between range time having great access to beaches and sunshine and climbing and ice cream and shizzle.
And, to be fair, we only wanted to use it for a base as an AT camp… And Penally worked exceptionally well for that purpose.
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Have you tried to book Senny before? I’d be interested to know how well that works.
Senny we have done. But only on a multi wing scale - 200-300 cadets. And with a very limited area of operations based out of a series of stone tents, barns and farm complexes rather than living out of camp itself. Catering was provided by camp… In Norwegian flasks. And a good 30-45min drive away. Sometimes it arrived tepid…
We’d often find Army Reserve/OTC units operating around us at the weekend and Regulars during the week. Sometimes great bonds were formed and out timetable/plans got torn to shreds because the neighbouring units invited us along to observe the training or have interest talks - which was great. Other times it was torn up because the “priority unit” decided to ignore their submitted plans, not bother to deconflict and just close roads, conduct section attacks on the wrong place or just to break down on a single track lane and confine us to the farm for a day.
When it worked it worked very well… But when it didn’t, it made for a lousy camp. And certainly no ice cream or beaches.
Yep, just as I remember it from basic training then!
We lost one of our fellow recruits going man-down whilst there. A chap from Ghana who decided all he wanted to eat during that week was sugar packets. We found him in one of the baths trying to cool himself down… whilst it was snowing.
I have been to Penally both as a cadet in the 1980s and off an on until 2019. Very run down and very basic. Great gallery range and a good base of Adv Trg and a general camp for cadets. Have done, week camps, PTS training weekends, shooting and road marching. It will be missed as it was a great base to operate out of.
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