Sitting on a high point that dominates the Somme landscape,

Highwood was one of the most bitterly contested corners of the 1916 battlefield.

Today its trees resound with the sound of birds,

but more than a century ago, cavalry, flame, mines and tanks brought their special kind of warfare to high wood.

I don't know about you, but it does feel as if the world is beginning to emerge from the experiences that we've all had over the course of the last 15 months or so.

It seems as if we're all beginning to do those things that we could describe as normal.

Last week, I was down in Sussex, the county of my birth, with my old friend John Hayes Fisher walking the South Downs area

and going along the paths and the lanes and across that chalk landscape

which is so reminiscent of the Somme.

I think one of the reasons I've always been so connected to the Somme area

apart from its history, is the

familiarity of the terrain, the way it feels like Sussex where I grew up. And as we had a few

days going round Sussex villages, once again in churches tucked away in the quiet corners of that

county, were war memorials with familiar names

and lists of places and dates that somehow transported me back to the old front line. So while those

sort of things are now possible, getting back to the battlefields of the Great War is still a distant horizon, quite when we'll return.

Who knows at the moment, hopefully, sometime in the next few months.

This week I found myself back at work at Ledger Holidays, beginning the process to restart our battlefield tours whenever that will be.

And all of this, I guess, will make us, certainly makes me think about how quiet those places must have been

in the course of this last 15 months and how desperately, really, the people who work there,

who live there, who have businesses there need us to return.

The infrastructure on these battlefields is part of the way in which we help preserve it, help ensure that it doesn't disappear.

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