Like monoliths that mark an ancient world,

the bunkers, the pillboxes of Flanders,

bring us to the ground where the Great War was fought around deep.

What can we find of them on the landscape today?

The Great War has more than a few iconic symbols of that conflict,

things like gas masks, rhomboid-shaped tanks,

and the zig-zag of trenches and the curl of barbed wire,

but also, I think, concrete bunkers.

When we imagine a battlefield, a landscape, for example, of the Western Front,

we imagine those trenches in the shell holes and the stunted trees,

and amongst them the concrete structures.

Defensive points so often written about, spoken about in the accounts of the fighting

in places, particularly places like Ipp in Flanders.

And it's those concrete bunkers, the pillboxes of Flanders, that we'll look at in this podcast.

When I first went to Epe in 1982, I had in the back of my mind probably a list of things that I expected to see,

given that I'd read even by then as a teenager so much about the Great War and been so

heavily influenced by popular culture of the Great War including the comic strip Charlie's War

and on that lists were bunkers so at the time it wasn't as much of a surprise to me to see so many of them. And that

first trip was a school trip and our teachers, one of whom was totally obsessed with the Great

War, took us to some of the bunkers that were well off the beaten path. I mean there were so few

visitors to the battlefields in the early 1980s anyway,

but they had found some locations themselves. And they took us, for example, to some bunkers

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