During my Christmas break taking time to pause and take stock a bit, I heard the sound of my local church bells drift across the fields from the heart of the village near where I live.

And I realised I don't talk about this area perhaps as much as I did when I lived in Elsica,

in South Yorkshire. My home now is in East Kent, close to Ashford, but in the parish of

Kings North, an ancient settlement with the moat of a medieval

manor house, now the centrepiece of my local park. Before the Great War, the 5th Battalion of the

East Kent Regiment, the Buffs, recruited in this area, with their headquarters, their battalion

headquarters in Ashford. Of its local eight companies

recruited in the wider area of this part of East Kent, they often look to draw in men

from the kind of farming community that Kings North was then. And as a unit when the Great War

began, they went on to serve in India and then in Mesopotania

in the second half of the conflict. Now, when I first moved to this area, I visited my local

church, St Michael's. I walked across the fields where there was evidence of the last Great World War with concrete bunkers from one of the

stop lines in this area and in the churchyard I found quite a number of war graves from the

Great War which is not uncommon right across Britain I think there's something like 12,000 grave

locations that the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission are responsible for.

And when I went into the church, I found a plaque listing the local men who were killed, got talking to some of the church wardens there,

and they proudly showed me the research that they'd done during the Great War centenary,

where they'd discovered the story behind all of the men who were'd done during the Great War Centenary, where they'd

discovered the story behind all of the men who were commemorated on that war memorial.

But as I heard the bells drift across the fields this Christmas, it made me think of the village

110 years ago and what lay ahead in that great year of 1916. The rector of St Michael's then

was the Reverend Henry Furley. He was a father of six children with roots in Canterbury,

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