Welcome to Dispatches, a shorter podcast from the Old Frontline and me, military historian Paul Reed.

In the familiar landscape of Piccadie, there is also a forgotten song, and today we walk one part of it at Red An Ridge.

One of the many things that I love about the Somme battlefields of the Great War

are those many quiet corners where you can connect with the history of the conflict on a wide open landscape

dossed with the beacons of that war the silent cities the cemeteries you can kind of get lost in those

landscapes of the som and indeed many battlefields along the

Western Front. One such place that I never tire of walking in those Somme battlefields, but which,

for a number of reasons, never seems to get that many visitors is the Red An Ridge.

Located between the villages of Beaumont-Hammel and Sayre, two household names from 1916 and

the Battle of the Somme, it isn't as well known as the events that took place there,

particularly at the beginning of the battle,

but yet it was one of the greatest killing fields on that first day of the Somme, 1st of July, 1916.

So where are we for this dispatches, a glimpse of the battlefields of the Red Hand Ridge. We've just walked up the sunken lane,

the famous sunken lane, between Ocean Vieux, Ocean Villas, and Beaumont-Amelle.

This was in no man's land at the time of the Battle of the Somme, an annexed by the Lancashire's

and the brigade trench mortars and machine guns,

and where Geoffrey Malins filmed before they went over the top at 7.30 that morning.

But it's not that story that we're going to look at in this podcast.

We're walking up the sunken lane to where it curves and arches towards another

track that goes from left to right in front of us, and that's Watling streets on the maps.

All of these little lanes and pathways were given a name on the trench maps of the Great War so they could

be identified in messages and communicates that were sent from the battlefield. And where we're

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