We have spent today (Saturday) touring some of the Battlefields and memorials from the Battle of the Somme 1916. In this Centenary year of the start of World War One it is difficult to imagine the sheer horror of this war. The whole of the Somme countryside is filled with dozens of memorials and cemeteries from the war, some small, and some very large indeed. Each patch of land that these stand on was given by France in perpetuity to the relevant country in recognition of the lives sacrificed in the war. As it happens we stumbled upon a few memorials from the four corners of the UK…...
Wales...
This is the Franco-British Memorial in Thiepval and at 45 metres high is the largest British war memorial in the world. It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and built between 1929 and 1932. It commemorates over 72000 men who were declared missing in the Somme between 1915 and 1918…… On the far side of the monument are the graves of 600 soldiers…...
300 French graves….
300 British graves….
Northern Ireland...
Scotland… Memorial to the 51st Highland Division which is in the grounds of the Canadian Beaumont-Hamel memorial ground
This is the memorial to the Newfoundlanders. In the foreground are original trenches...
This tree was called the ‘Danger Tree’ to which many of the Newfoundlanders gravitated towards as their advance was halted in a storm of bullets and shrapnel (July 1st 1916 offensive).
A typical trench from the ‘Front Line'
And lastly…….. a rather cute Red Squirrel that we saw in one of the cemeteries
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