A glimpse inside Celtic Manorland

By Nick Horton BBC Wales news website

Up to 40 minutes simply to get in to the building's media centre

There is a new nation inside Wales.

It is called Celtic Manorland, and you wouldn't want to live there too long.

Two days, in fact, is as much as any of us will have to spend in the airtight bubble that is the Celtic Manor Resort near Newport encasing the European Union's foreign ministers.

And, despite the five-star splendour and free lunches, that's quite enough, thank you.

Normally, of course, you would be delighted to drop into the luxurious Celtic Manor. High-livers such as Catherine Zeta Jones, Michael Douglas and Robbie Williams did just that for a celebrity golf tournament only last weekend.

But if the reading matter of choice a few days ago was Heat magazine, today it is the Financial Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, and - with Turkey's possible accession to the EU the hot topic - the Turkish Daily News.

There is serious business going on here, and no visitor to Celtic Manorland could doubt that for a moment.

In the rough: police officers keep an eye on the links at Celtic Manor

It took me 40 minutes from my first attempt to breach the border - or, more accurately, drive through the entrance - to actually reach the media centre.

In that time I showed my pass to seven policemen and women, and was told three times that my car would have to be searched (wrongly, as it turned out).

Everyone also goes through an airport-style check gate which blows air all over your body and is of such security sensitivity that photographs of it are banned.

But the clampdown began a long time before that.

The happy task of guarding Celtic Manorland has fallen to Gwent Police, many months of planning have gone into it, and it shows. In Britain 2005, most of us accept the need for security, even if occasionally we can be forgiven for begrudging the intrusion into our lives.

So when applying for accreditation, we media folk had to give the usual personal information, such as mobile phone and passport numbers. But there was plenty more, even including our parents' names as they appear on their passports. (Confession: I forgot to include my mother's middle name on mine, but still mercifully managed to sneak under the security barrier).

EU dignitaries meet and greet, as seen on TV in the media centre

The physical hurdles are far more intimidating. Steel fences ring the 1,400 acres of Celtic Manorland, and huge yellow barriers apparently big and ugly enough to halt your average tank are on every approach road.

Having decided against testing the barriers' rigour with my Peugeot 305, I hopped on a courtesy bus to reach the hotel. It snaked its way around a Celtic Manorland crawling with yellow-jacketed police and their more sinister-looking colleagues all in black.

Once inside, this fledgling nation resembles a Tom Clancy novel, with darkened-window people carriers whizzing by, men with black suits and all-seeing eyes, helicopters hovering constantly, and over-excited police dogs yapping.

The journalists, meanwhile, are pretty much penned in the media centre, descending like vultures in search of scraps of information on the officials who wander through.

My request to one security man for permission to walk 10 yards out of the defined territory to take a photo of a large group of police vans was politely but decisively declined.

You learn quickly that there is not much point arguing with the law in Celtic Manorland.