As cars rumbled along a busy motorway from Calais to Reams, close by are two of the smallest

Canadian cemeteries of the Great War. What were Zivvy and Litchfield craters? And how did the

Canadian heroes who took Vimy Ridge in 1917 come to be buried here.

I've just come back from my latest visit to the old front line.

It'll probably be my last of this year.

Foreign travel regulations have changed once more,

making visits across there a little bit more difficult. It'll probably be the beginning of next year before I get to return.

It was a good few days, pottering along northern France, different parts of the old front line from the behind the lines area near to Bethune,

on the forgotten front sector, then out onto the Luz battlefields and some time around

Arras and Vimy Ridge, of which leads us on to this week's podcast, and then down on

the song. We stayed in a really nice little jete at Gomacour, myself and my old friend Andrew,

who I was at school with. We travelled together on that very first trip to the battlefields in 1982, thanks to our teachers at school.

So it was good to be back on the ground with Andrew once more, and following some of the stories of Canadian soldiers that he'd been researching.

We just found ourselves pottering really in some respect, stopping

at cemeteries that we came across, visiting some new sites, going back to old places

that we've been to before, and very often finding new things there. I think this is one of the great

pleasures and the great experiences of visiting the battlefields of the Great War

is that no matter how many times you've been to a place

you always feel as if you come away with something new,

some fresh anecdote, some discovery on a headstone and inscription,

the details of a soldier, a faded photograph tucked into a cemetery visitor's book that someone has left behind

bringing a face to that soldier. And it's all part of the continual learning and understanding

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