On a hillside high above the village of Freakour,

the Bois Francé, the French wood,

stands above the beacons of the Great War,

the small soldiers' cemeteries

that lead us across the tracks of the battlefield in spring sunshine.

As the spring moves into the early summer,

I've found myself back on the old front line on a much more regular basis.

In the past month, I've been on the Somme almost every week,

and it's good to see how the landscape is changing as the seasons

change and to see visitors returning in greater numbers in the previous years that we've had.

On one of the trips I went over to do a recie, a battlefield recie with fellow battlefield guides

Tim Thurlow and Mark Allen,

to walk some of the ground of the Somme in preparation for a new battlefield tour that we're doing

with Ledger Holidays later this year. And it gave me an opportunity as I walked that ground

to record some thoughts on places that we have covered in previous podcast episodes,

but it was good to kind of be there and look at the landscape, look at the cemeteries,

think of the stories, and put that into perspective and put some thoughts on it while actually

on the ground.

And I've tried to do this before with some sound issues which some of you have picked up on in previous podcast episodes, but I think we've solved that now.

Thanks largely to our podcast supporters who support via Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon.

It's given me using the money that we raised through the supporters

to buy the right kind of kit to do this properly.

...