I was aiming for a Verdon episode this weekend, it being close to the 110th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Verdun in 1916, but having just returned from a week in Epe with wet Flanders flu,

a stinking cold, and you can probably still hear that in my voice,

unfortunately that put me behind a little.

So instead, we will visit an area I walked when on that Flanders trip,

and which we referenced as part of an answer, a wider

eat walk in a recent Q&A and an area that saw fighting 110 years ago, not in the Battle of the

Somme, not in the Battle of Verdun, but in the fighting in Flanders in 1916 in one of the lesser

known battles of that year. So where are we? Where do we begin this

walk? Well we're south-east of Eap in an area that became known as the bluff today. It's a

bit of ground known as the paling beak. So what was the bluff in the context of the First World War?

Well, this was an area in the years before the Great War

where they'd been the construction of a canal, the Ipe Comene Canal.

And there'd been a lot of problems in the construction of that canal.

Sections of it had never really functioned properly

and pretty much the canal by 1914 was silted up and not used.

But in the construction of sections of it,

they had to dig deep into the Flanders landscape

and throw up the earth around it,

creating these artificial mounds.

And that area of rising ground that had been constructed, effectively created by the building of the canal,

was this bit of grounds between the village of Zillabeek and Klein Zillabik

and across towards the village of Scenta Loire, across a rising bit of ground that would later become

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