Winter is coming on the Somme, a time of quietness, of solitude on those massive landscapes of Pickety.

And in this episode, we take a winter walk on the Somme battlefields of 1916. It's that time of year when the weather

along the old front line begins to change. Autumn is moving closer to winter and the nights grow longer and the days shorter and the temperature drops.

There's been the first frost on the som and this week that I'm recording this episode

will be the first falls of snow. The seasons change and with it the battlefields,

the landscape of the Great War, that changes too. It's all part of our experience, I think,

when we visit these battlefields of the Great War,

seeing them in the different seasons,

experiencing that changing weather is all part of what we get when we walk those pathways and head for those beacons

on that landscape of the past.

And what the weather does, I guess, is give us a bit of a nod to the past.

We can feel that weather in our modern clothing that gives us protection.

And we can think of those troops in those shallow ditches,

in those vast open fields with very little to protect them from the snow from the sub-zero temperatures aside from all that was happening around them on the

battlefield but there's also a quietness in the winter the battlefields are not as busy with casual visitors and you can have

that landscape to yourself. So in this episode we're going to take a winter walk on the Somme,

starting in a place, a well-trodden place by this podcast at Corsolet, but taking some tracks that we haven't

followed as yet on the old front line and making our journey towards Chiapval, the village

on that high ridge beyond, an ending in the area close to the Ankara Valley.

So this will be ground that will chronologically cover probably most of the battle one way and another,

from the bright sunshine of the 1st of July 1916 through to the cold and the snow and the darkness and the end of the battle

in November of the same year and it highlights the importance of walking the ground by walking

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