Once a place where lovers met in the twilight, a gentle slope on the Flanders landscape

became known to the British Tommy as Hill 60, an infamous corner of the battlefields around

deep, where perhaps as many as 8,000 men still lie beneath its slopes.

We return to Flanders for this episode, which in many ways is quite fitting because I wanted to begin this week by paying tribute to an old friend of mine who sadly passed away last week. Jackie Plato was known to many of you who visit the Epe battlefields. He was a member of the Last Post Association who ensured that the last post

is continued to be played at the Mening Gate every evening in remembrance of those

a quarter of a million British and Commonwealth

soldiers who died in defence of Eap during the Great War. Jackie had worked there for many

years as a marshal and many of you going on your own private visits or perhaps with adult

or school groups will have encountered him in enabling you to carry out your

acts of remembrance and he was an incredibly generous and funny person with a great sense of

humour and someone who I'd had the luck to be out on the battlefields with on several occasions over the years.

And way back in the early 2000s, Jackie had been involved in a local amateur archaeology group

called the Diggers, and they'd been responsible for the excavation of the site around Bozinger.

And thanks to Jackie, I had a chance to go and have a look at that,

see the work that they were doing, uncovering the trenches there,

and also going down into some of the dugouts that they were unearthing.

And this eventually led to a magnificent exhibition in the Bozinger School,

which was attended by a BBC producer called John Hayes Fisher who realised the potential

of this and this led to eventually to the broadcast of a documentary on the work of the diggers

called Forgotten Battlefield in which I appeared as one of the contributors so that part of

the battlefields and Jackie and his great friend or Elsa K, they're forever part really of my sort of anchors, as it were, to the Great War battlefields, part of that old guard who've been on the ground for so long and who have ensured that the torch of remembrance burns brightly. And in the case of both Jackie and Orell and the other diggers, they'd also ensured that

the recovery of soldiers from the battlefield had taken place. And these men were just no longer

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