The marquee at Fforest is festival-sized and the stage is a proper lifted one, so the full 11-piece spreads out on it without anyone playing over a shoulder, and the band can see the room. Load-in is a short carry off the lawn. If the grass is soft you can sometimes drive across it instead - Fforest keep a tractor on hand for the vehicles that don’t make it back off.
Fforest Farm at a glance
Fforest is a 200-acre working farm and rural events venue on the Teifi Gorge near Cilgerran, ten minutes from Cardigan. Accommodation runs across a Georgian farmhouse, geodesic domes and cabins. The event spaces are the main marquee, a barn for breakouts or acoustic sets, and open grounds for the daytime. Corporate bookings typically run 100-160 guests, with catering and logistics handled in-house. The same site hosts weddings. Fforest’s website has the accommodation and facilities detail.
Setting up in the marquee
The stage sits off the floor rather than on a makeshift riser, and the D&B Audiotechnik PA is permanent, so there is no front-of-house rig to truck in. Our engineer mixed the room on their system while the band ran in-ears off our own IEM rig - no wedges, so nothing on the stage competes with the PA in a canvas room. Power comes off single-phase 13A sockets. The lighting is already rigged into the structure, so there are no rigging points to hunt for and no second rig on the invoice.
Band size for the marquee
An 11-piece is what this room asks for. There is space for the full horn section and rhythm section to spread out, and at 100-160 guests in a marquee this size a smaller lineup reads as undersized rather than intimate. The weight also gives the night somewhere to go - down through dinner, full push once the floor opens.
How a corporate day runs here
Activities run first - team challenges, lunch in the barn or under cover - and the marquee becomes the focus as the light goes. We start the first set around 8-9pm, timed to the venue’s catering and the client’s schedule, then play two hour-long sets. While guests are eating through the first set, Fforest often runs a quieter second set in the barn or a breakout space; we have had Apple Tree Theory doing exactly that, which keeps the rest of the site alive and buys the kitchen some room. By the second set the dancefloor is the whole event, and a DJ - often someone from the client’s own staff - takes the late end.
Working with the Fforest team
They run corporate groups and weddings often enough to have the logistics settled before anyone arrives: weather contingencies, vehicle traffic on a wet lawn, catering timed around the entertainment, how to use the barn without pulling people out of the main room. Changes on the day get sorted rather than escalated.
The Brotherhood are the premier South Wales corporate band, playing events across West Wales from our Newport base. Check our availability for your event at Fforest Farm, or see what we cover across Pembrokeshire and West Wales.
