I've been travelling across that landscape of the Western Front over the last few weeks,

and this week I'm on the very front line.

I'm literally on the old front line at Houg just outside of Ipe in Flanders.

I'm staying in a cottage here thanks to Nick at Hougcrate.

This is a cottage, Cottage to Vink.

He rents out for people who want to come to stay in this part of the battlefields.

And it is literally close to the German front line overlooking the British front line

where there was static trench warfare for two years.

And as we've had a lot of battlefield-related questions come in in recent weeks,

I thought being here on the old front line,

it was a good excuse to have a special battlefield Q&A. And on one of my recent trips, I was reminded

how important the landscape of the First World War and what we find in it, often for the first time, can be to people.

We've all got our connections to the First World War through our relatives who served, and I have mine,

some of whom I've spoken about on this podcast, but back in 2011, when they released the 1911 census and that eventually came online,

I discovered that there was an ancestor in my family tree that I didn't know anything about,

Frank Rose. Rose is a French name. My grandmother was a French ancestry. And this man, this man who suddenly leapt out

from the past at me, Frank Rose, transpired that he was killed in the Great War. He'd served

initially with the 10th London Regiment, the Hackney-Gurkers eventually transferred into the 1st Battalion, the Hampshire Regiment,

and was killed in an attack on a small village in October 1918.

And just a couple of weeks ago, I took a journey across that landscape northeast of the city of Combay

in the ground where some of the final battles of the Great War took place.

An open landscape cut by hedgerows.

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