Its twin pylons rising high over the Artaire Plain, the Vimy Memorial marks Canada's contribution to the Great War.

Here more than 11,000 missing soldiers are commemorated.

Here, the pathways of Canada's history, more than a century ago collide.

What does Vimy in this memorial mean to us today?

We're back in the year 1917 for this episode,

not looking at the film which we covered in a previous podcast and not on the battlefields of the Hindenburg line but an area north-east of

the city of Arras in northern France were on Vimy Ridge. Now we're not going to look at the

battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917 involving the men of the Canadian Corps. That's a story for another

day for another podcast. What we're going to look at instead is the Vimy Memorial itself,

but we're going to do a walk to get there,

and we're going to start in the car park of the visitor centre,

right within the Canadian Memorial Park on the ridge itself.

This saw a lot of redevelopment in the lead up to the centenary of the fighting here in 2017

and the building construction of a brand new visitor centre

and it's here that the young Canadian guides who work here for several months at a time

will take you around this part of the battlefield will explain the history

this is where they're based.

Now we're not going to go in there today in fact in a future podcast when we can get back to the old battlefields

of the great war i hope to go and speak to people like this to ask them about the work they do on

the ground itself but today we'll put that to one side and we'll go past the visitor center

into the trees to an area where we can begin to see trenches and shell holes amongst those trees.

Now here as you walk away from that visitor centre you come through that area where you first begin to see those trenches

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