Two small villages in Piccadilly mark some of the heaviest fighting in this sector of the Somme in July of 1916.

What do we find when we walk the ground between La Boiselle and Contal Maison?

It's spring on the old front line.

The crops are beginning to emerge from winter's fields.

The chif-chaff has returned to Thiepval wood.

I heard him there just a few weeks ago,

and the skies above the vast open landscapes will soon be full not just of the song of the skylark,

but the black shapes of darting swifts and swallows as they return from their winter break.

The landscape of the Great War changes once more as it does each year,

and as we return now in greater numbers than the past two years,

we see it afresh somehow. The connection between nature, the landscape and the history of the

Great War is one that is not lost, I think, on visitors that return to those battlefields on a regular basis,

and was not lost on the men who were there more than a hundred years ago. And that connection,

that symmetry between what they saw from their muddy trenches, as migratory birds passed over

the sky and through the midst of shells above them them is something that has never been lost on me.

This is Season 4 of the Old Frontline podcast. It's hard to believe that we're now in our third year of the Old Frontline.

We've recently passed more than half a million downloads. It's really quite incredible, and I can't thank you enough for listening, downloading,

supporting the podcast by listening to it or joining us as a Patreon or buy me a coffee supporter.

And I can't thank you enough either for all the kind comments that you make on social media,

whether that's on our Twitter page or on our Facebook page.

Producing the podcast has been a true labour of love for me.

In these past two years, we've all felt at some distance from the battlefields of the Great War,

...