On the high ground around the Somme village of Beaumont-Hammel,

Hawthorne Ridge dominates the landscape both in the modern world and the world of the Great War.

In this episode, we walk that battlefield from Hawthorne Ridge to the sunken lane.

In the second of our recordings made on the battlefields of the Western Front,

we're back on the Somme in the ground around the village of Beaumont-Hamble

and walking between Hawthorne Ridge and the

sunken lane. We've had a lot about Hawthorne Ridge this month with the old front line with the

first of our vlogs, our video podcasts on YouTube. And that's a visual way to tell the story

and this is the more traditional podcast way to do it.

There is some crossover between those two formats but I think that this is quite a good way to talk about this subject

and through the podcast probably spend a bit more time thinking about different themes connected to these places that we walk when we walk the battlefields of the Great War and how they strike us.

I think that's one of the things that I've learned through doing this approach by recording some material actually on the ground itself.

I can stop and I can think about the history

and give you my thoughts on that ground as we're there. And that's something that I'm going to do

more of as we go forward. I think it shows too that no matter how many times you've walked or been over or visited a particular location

on the old front line, it's still somehow never enough. I mean, I have no idea how many times

I've been to Hawthorne Ridge since I first went there in the mid-1980s. How many times I've stood at Eric Heaton's grave,

how many times I've walked around the Hawthorne Crater

or gone into the sunken lane.

But every time there is something different, something fresh, a perspective,

something that I've read recently or something I've thought about,

a memory of a chat with a veteran or a page in a diary or a letter, it comes back and I look

...