Above the town of Albert on the Somme, a ridge line was named after two hills in Ireland.

What's the story of the Tara Usner line?

And what do we find at a junk sale in northern France that leads us down some very different avenues of Great War history.

I've been privileged to spend a lot of time on the old front line recently,

staying at Eap, visiting Luz, and then spending a week on the Hindenburg Line battlefields of 1917, 18.

This episode will go out close to the fifth anniversary of the podcast,

when we first broadcast an episode about posseers on the song,

just as all of us had gone into lockdown in those now far-off COVID times. And I've often spoken about the path to the podcast. I've been meaning to do one for a very long time. And suddenly that moment

gave me the opportunity to do it. And I won't go over all of that again. But it's important,

I think, even in a small way, to mark this anniversary.

And travelling around the last few weeks, I've been reflecting on the podcast and how it has

become so much a part of my life in those five years that followed the broadcast of that

episode about posseous, something I feel not just happy and

content about, but also feel lucky that I've been able to find a new way to take what I've done

for most of my life and what I've discovered over most of that life and turn it into something that

engages others and means something to them on their own Great War journey.

I passed Posseaer's last week and thought about how even that has changed in the last five years with the death of my old friend

Christian Fouca. The Foucairs were a French couple, Eve and Christian, who I met very early on

in my journey across that landscape of the First World War. Eve was then still a Commonwealth Wargraves Commission gardener.

He joined them as Imperial Wargraves Commission in 1947,

and they lived in and around Posseers for a huge chunk of their life

and all of their married life.

...