Each year many thousands travel to Ipe or the rolling downlands around Albaer

where the mighty battle of 1916 on the Somme took place.

But there's much more to the Great War and the men and women who fought in it.

So what can we find?

What does it mean to go beyond the Somme?

I've just come back from another battlefield, Recky,

looking at the Great War battlefields, from the Shemenda Dam to Reims to Verdun and the Argonne.

These recies that we do as part of our work as battlefield guides are really important to set the scene of the tour to enhance the archive

and paper research that we've done to make these tours possible and bring together something

that we often discuss on this podcast bring together the elements of the landscape of the Great War so that when we

visit those areas with groups we can help them understand that landscape too and understand

what it is that they're seeing on that modern landscape and how it relates to the landscape of the First World War

because to the average visitor, a field is a field, a wood, is a wood downland, looks no different

in the downs of Sussex or Hampshire or Wiltshire or so many other places besides.

And part of the craft, I guess, of a battlefield guide

is to take that landscape as it is today

and to relate it to the past and meaningful and understandable way.

And the recies are very much part of that. And when we go on

these recies, it's not really to do the historical research. We find out a lot of stuff along the

way that sometimes you can only do by being on the ground. And even if you've read 100 reports

of the Battle of Verdun or the British on the Aine and even if you've read a hundred reports of the battle of verdun or the

British on the Aine in 1914 until you've seen the ground where their trenches were dug

...