The old Roman road that extended from the city of Epe to the town of Menin

took the men of both sides into the very heart, the dark heart of conflict in Flanders during the Great War.

Here today as we follow that route, what do we find of the culture of the old front line?

We've spoken in a recent episode about the Albert Bapot-Ome road on the Somme

and how those main roads which cut across the landscape of the Western Front

are perhaps taken for granted as we use them today to traverse that ground, but yet are themselves incredibly important as pathways to the past and are all part of how we access the past via that landscape of the present.

And we've spoken about this and its relation to the culture of the old front line.

And I do think that there is something in this idea of a culture.

The battlefields have something about them that we know is tangible,

but we can't always quantify. And I think our search for the understanding of that is all

part of that culture. But those roads, they guide us, they lead us. They aren't simply a route from one place to another.

And along them are the many layers of history by which we understand the Great War.

And with it, perhaps, how we begin to put together the jigsaw pieces of that conflict and make sense of them.

We discussed the Albeir-Bapholm Road and what that means to the Somme battlefields of 1916 and another obvious one to explore and consider is the

Menin Road at Epe, a road and a name that is certainly very much part of the war's culture in Flanders,

whether it be from the perspective of veterans, accounts written both then and later,

or how we view that very central part of what was once the Eap salient, but as it is today. For me, the Menin Road is a very

evocative name, almost a phrase, really, a byword for the Great War at Eap. And I remember

veterans that I interviewed in the 80s and 90s discussing it with me,

talking about marching up that Menin Road with starshells cutting the sky in the distance over the ridges beyond,

or gunners galloping in their limbers across Hellfire Corner and straight up the Menin Road to get to the

gun sites to feed those guns to continue with the bombardment to fight another day in this massive

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