A high pressure container (eg a gun barrel) 10 has a wall including a layer of fiber composite material 14 which comprises ceramic and/or metallic powder matrix with fiber material reinforcement and which is produced by an explosive compression process. As shown the wall (10) is of multi-layer construction produced by explosive compression and comprises an internal layer (11) a fiber composite layer (12) of a pulverous mixture of metal and ceramic, a layer (13) of tungsten compounds, an FC layer (14) of an aligned long fibre, arranged in a wound configuration in a metal matrix and an external layer (15) comprising a steel tube. <IMAGE>
