Our journeys along the pathways of the Somme battlefields

not only take us to the places where the fighting reached its peak,

but to those villages, those quiet lanes and woods, behind the lines.

In this episode, we walk the village of May May behind the Somme front of 1916.

Welcome back to the old front line podcast in the start of what is season 8 and we're now moving rapidly towards our fifth anniversary.

Yep, that's right, our fifth anniversary.

Can it really be five years since I recorded that very first episode on Poziers?

It's truly amazing.

What began in a very difficult time for all of us

when we were often isolated and alone,

and certainly in respects of the battlefields of the Great War,

we all felt a very, very long way from them. It was a way of perhaps of

weaving us all closer to that place, to that landscape of the First World War. And I had no idea

that I would still be doing it five years later and certainly no idea that we'd have achieved so much along the way.

I get a huge amount of pleasure through doing this podcast.

It's truly amazing, really, that we not only have the opportunity

to discuss the Great War and share our fascination of the Great War,

it's a way in which I've learned, continue to learn so much, and through interacting with so many of you,

I've been truly humbled, really, by so many of your comments and the way you've expressed what the

Great War means to you and as we move into that fifth anniversary period this March we're

also approaching 250 episodes of the old front line which I think will probably reach some time in the autumn.

And incredibly, back in December, I checked the podcast statistics the other day.

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