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The next leg of the project involved meeting up with the senior archaeologist from the MoD to look at getting access to the Plain. Again many e-mails back and forth and eventually a meeting date was set. I have some experience of being on an army camp due to a workshop project in a military school at one point but generally, like the corporate world, I feel like a complete fish out of water in this environment. I may be completely off key here but I feel that the military environment is just about as far apart from the contemporary art environment as possible. Whereas in the corporate world there is room for creative thinking as long as it leads to profit, in the military world, you have a structure to conform to where any sort of deviation or individuality threatens to undermine, what needs to be, an extremely rigid system.

Everyone was very friendly however and the senior archaeologist gave me a wonderful overview of the history of Salisbury Plain. I couldn’t begin to tell you the wealth of activity that has taken place there over the centuries from the truly staggering achievement of Stonehenge through to the strange and desolate constructions the MoD have erected for training in various conflicts. With particular focus on World War I the Plain is littered with remnants of the various international troops that trained there, Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders in particular. From the soldiers carvings remaining on the trees in the wooded areas, to the graves when illness took the lives of many soldiers, and the Giant Kiwi carved into the landscape to keep bored and mischievous New Zealanders busy until repatriation, the place has endless stories to tell. But back to logistics.

The next step was training to receive my yellow pass which would allow access to the areas that were sealed off to the general public. Again many e-mails, many phone calls, and eventually the training day came. Another bizarre episode where a sergeant major terrified me and a group of amateur archaeologists with photos of unfortunate individuals who have picked up debris on the Plain or wandered into the pathway of a speeding tank and not lived to tell the tale.

Armed with my yellow pass, a map of the military Plain which made little sense to me and a table of planned military manoeuvres for the next few weeks that was full of baffling acronyms (the army survive on acronyms), I questioned my chances of survival. I had already had one experience with my son where we were happily trudging over land to the replica German village (mostly open to the public), when machine gun fire ripped across our path and sent us flying back to the car.

In the end I shouldn’t have worried as despite all this planning, training and confirmation I accidently got through on the phone to a sergeant major in a training session who, in between yelling and gunfire, questioned what it was I was doing, insisted I go through a whole raft of red tape involving thousands of pounds for a licence, which, even then I was told was almost certainly likely to result in access being denied as it may not show the military in a good light. To cut a long story short, and after he had pulled in various higher departments the next day on the matter, I finally gave up the fight on this one.

Bearing in mind that while this was going on, I was also wrangling (on endless emails) with DSTL at Porton Down and juggling a host of other projects, it turned out to be a massively stressful time altogether.


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