I'm pleased to be joined once more by Professor Mark Connolly,

an old friend of the podcast. Mark has contributed a massive amount to some of the lesser

known aspects of the Great War, especially that interwar

period of battlefield pilgrimage and is the author of numerous articles and books on the subject.

During the First World War centenary, he was hugely successful with a number of engaging

projects and he joins us tonight because of an excellent talk Mark gave at my local Western

Front Association meeting here in Kent. Now retired or semi-retired from the world of academia,

Mark leads tours in the UK and on the battlefields of the Great War and we'll put a link to that

in the show notes. So welcome back Mark. So much for asking me. It's great to be here

on this, what has been a beautiful March day. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. We're coming out the other side.

The old front line is emerging in the spring, which is not a bad thing. So I went to the local WFA branch

and heard your talk and I was so kind of encapsulated by it really in terms of the subject matter and everything else, which really kind of ticks along with what we've often discovered really here and discussed rather here on the podcast.

So in this chat, we're going to talk about chalk, Englishness and the Great War,

which some people will say, you know, what do you mean? Chalk, Englishness and the Great War.

It's very much a landscape subject, isn't it?

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And, well, all the people you've led over the years, but as we're always saying, aren't it? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And, well, all the people that you've led over the years,

but as we're always saying, aren't we, the way to understand those battlefields is to get the boots on

and walk them. And even if you're someone who, shall we say, is purely interested in the military

history, understanding every ripple and

rise in that landscape is crucial to that. And yeah, the bit that I'm really interested in

is the kind of cultural landscape that goes around it. And how I think important that was during the war because it comes out of a

particularly rich English pre-war understanding of landscape and then gets carried out the other

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