On a hill above a small village near the city of Arras stood a wooden cross

that remembered men from Yorkshire and Durham who had fallen there in April 1917.

What became of that memorial? What stories can we find at Henin Hill?

I was over on the Somme battlefields the week before last,

leading a war poetry and war writers' tour

that took us from the Great War battlefields

to those of the next Great War to Normandy

to D-Day to look at the stories there but when I was on the Somme it made me reflect why do people

almost prefer to come to a battlefield like the Somme to walk those chalk downlands of Piggottie rather than go to Flanders.

What is the draw from the Somme?

And I think it's not just a history, it's the landscape.

We often talk, we always talk about landscape on this podcast because it's so important.

And in Flanders there has been a lot of development and you have to search

really for the kind of landscape that you can connect to in the way that you very easily connect with

that landscape on the SOMs so the SOMs gets a lot of visitors as a consequence of this but as I was

driving down from our hotel to get down to the Somme,

we were staying up near Lille.

We crossed over and visited part of the Aras battlefield.

And it made me reflect that that terrain there, that landscape there,

is so similar to the SOM.

It too is a rolling chalk landscape and Aras has so much to

give. There is more of the modern world with factories and the motorway and an increasing number of

...