In a picturesque church of a small village in Somerset,

we find ourselves once more amongst those criss-cross paths of the Great War.

Here we find memorials to famous names,

but what does it tell us about the wider memorialisation

of a generation who fell in the trenches of the First World War.

While European travel has returned now, the Great War battlefields along the Western Front still

feel a little bit far away because there still are some barriers to travel. But this october it should be changing and i'll be off at

the end of this month on my very first battlefield tour since 2019 with ledger holidays and i hope to

record something from that for the podcast while I'm out there.

But this week we're looking once again of the subject that we've discussed a few times on the podcast and that's the First World War at home.

The Great War, the crisscross piles of the Great War, don't just take us to those battlefields

for more than a century ago. Whenever we go

out in our own communities and wherever we travel within this country, we come across

aspects of the Great War, whether that's war memorials in the towns and cities and the villages

or whether it's memorials to individuals who served and died

and sacrificed their all in that conflict.

The Great War really is everywhere.

It's all around us, and we encounter it in so many different ways.

So with that, with World War I at home in this episode, I travelled

last week down to St Andrew's Church at Mel's in Somerset with my old friend John Hayes Fisher.

John's a TV producer who I've had the pleasure of working with on many occasions over the

last 20 years on documentaries about the Great War.

...