Welcome to the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed.

This is a regular podcast where we can travel together across the haunting battlefields of the Great War,

from Flanders to the Somme and beyond.

So what's in this week's episode?

Hello and welcome back to the old front line.

This week we're going to look at the subject of battlefield archaeology,

what lies beneath the Western Front, in many respects, the last

witness of the First World War, discuss a First World War object that is a piece of archaeology,

and take a walk into Essex Farm dressing station bunkers near Epe.

Over the years of working as a battlefield guide with ledger holidays, I've been lucky to get to

know many people on the battlefields of the First World War. And back in the early 2000s,

one of my friends, Jackie Plattu, was not just a member of the Last Post Association, he was also a member of the last post association he was also a member

of the diggers which was a group of amateur battlefield archaeologists now at this stage

there were no professional archaeologists really doing any serious work on the battlefields of the

first world war it not as yet really attracted their attention.

So there were a number of groups like the diggers who were carrying out rescue archaeology work

at different locations along the Western Front. Significantly with the diggers, this was a massive project

because they were extending an industrial estate out northwards from Eap along the ESA Canal, the old medieval canal, which has once been used to ship cloth in medieval times when Eep was the centre of the European cloth trade.

At the time of the First World War, the canal straddled the frontline area.

And to the north, near to the village of Bozinger, or Buzingi, as the British troops called it,

it actually became part of the front line, with us on one side of the canal and the Germans on the other.

And it crossed the canal at a bend, going across

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