Away from the battlefields and home in Britain, the history of the Great War surrounds us.

At Shawnecliffe in Kent, we explore one of more than 12,000 grave locations located across the United Kingdom.

What can it tell us about the wider history of the First World War?

I often say that the Great War is all around us, and it is, on the war memorials, in our

local villages and towns and cities, in the churches churches and in the local small cemeteries,

the churchyards close to where we live, and across Britain in the houses where the soldiers who marched the war lived themselves.

Somehow the Great War is ever present if we search for it, if we care

to look. And right across Britain, something that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

had been looking to highlight in recent years, there are over 12,000 grave locations from both World Wars,

sometimes a single grave in a churchyard

through to bigger collections of burials.

And since my relocation back down to Kent,

I thought it was about time that I came out and reconnected with some of these

great war locations on my, which are now on my doorstep. And here I am today sitting in a quiet

corner of Kent in between the town of Hythe and the town of Folkston. The sea is just across

to my left. I can see it through the trees, the English Channel, and a few short miles across

that channel is the French coasts, and 40-odd miles beyond there was the Western Front.

And during the four years of the Great War, the civilian population were very aware of that

because they could hear the rumble of bombardments across that channel,

like a distant thunder drifting towards them.

But this was the power of the guns guns the power of the artillery taking place in

those battles along that western front bombarding the front lines and not just for the big battles as

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