John, a realtec.

More than 20 years ago, a BBC film crew covered the work of the diggers, a group of amateur archaeologists.

Archaeologists who are unearthing the history of the Great War beneath Flanders Fields.

In this episode, we have a forgotten battlefield reunion.

Welcome to a very special, very different trench chat.

It's not really like a normal trench chat.

I'm not going to interview people. There's three of us sitting here.

Myself, Paul Reed, military historian, Orel Saku, retired Belgian school teacher, who was a member of the diggers, a group of Belgian archaeologists, and John Hayes Fisher, a producer, director with a long career in the BBC.

And we're connected by the events of battlefield archaeology on the landscape around Bosinga at Epe

and the production by John of the Forgotten Battlefield documentary in 2001

that was then broadcast the following year.

And we'll put a YouTube version of that onto the podcast website

so you can watch it if you've never come across it before.

So this is more like, I suppose, between the three of us, a reunion really, rather than a direct kind of interview.

And we're all connected through this.

And I'm hoping that we're going to tell some of the stories about the work that Orell and the other diggers did on the battlefield,

how that kind of set a precedent for the whole interest in battlefield or conflict archaeology

and get an insight through John from a TV producer's perspective as to what we saw, what was recorded

and the impact that had, and I'll kind of dip in with what I remember of it as well.

So thank you, Orell. Welcome.

And I also want to thank Nick at Hoocaitre Museum and Cafe,

because we're sitting in his fabulous cottage.

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