SOMME: For my last day in Arras I went on a tour of the Battle of the Somme area with an extremely passionate Scotsman named Ian who came tearing into the youth hostel in his kilt to find me, much to the bemusement of everyone else! 
La Grande Mine, a huge crater that was made when Allied soldiers tunnelled towards the German trenches and planted a massive amount of explosives
What the Somme looks like today, basically unchanged since the war, apart from the fact that the fields are farmed and everything has regrown. Ian told us that every week the council sends a truck past all the farms to pick up all the shrapnel, old weapons and barbed wire that still comes up from the fields
Pozières cemetery. There are hundreds of these cemeteries across the Somme and it really is horrific how huge the loss of life was. It's hard to imagine the scale of it until you see all these cemeteries with the thousands upon thousands of headstones, many of which are dedicated to missing soldiers whose bodies were never found
It's a strange sensation to see the ANZAC symbol and Australian flags so far away from home. It's definitely the case that what soldiers from other countries (like Australia, NZ, the UK, India, Canada, South Africa etc) did during the war has not been forgotten. The road that this memorial was located on was called Rue d'Australie!
Thiepval Memorial, dedicated to the missing soldiers. It's horrific how large it is and how many names are on its walls. Even today though, remains keep surfacing from under the ground due to construction or the natural movement of the earth, and they remove that person's name from Thiepval if they can identify them
Poppies on the memorial at Thiepval
A picture of soldiers in the trenches, I can't imagine how horrible it would have been during winter with all the mud and the freezing temperatures
The Ulster memorial to Northern Irish soldiers
The Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont Hamel
La Grande Mine, a huge crater that was made when Allied soldiers tunnelled towards the German trenches and planted a massive amount of explosives What the Somme looks like today, basically unchanged since the war, apart from the fact that the fields are farmed and everything has regrown. Ian told us that every week the council sends a truck past all the farms to pick up all the shrapnel, old weapons and barbed wire that still comes up from the fields
Pozières cemetery. There are hundreds of these cemeteries across the Somme and it really is horrific how huge the loss of life was. It's hard to imagine the scale of it until you see all these cemeteries with the thousands upon thousands of headstones, many of which are dedicated to missing soldiers whose bodies were never found
It's a strange sensation to see the ANZAC symbol and Australian flags so far away from home. It's definitely the case that what soldiers from other countries (like Australia, NZ, the UK, India, Canada, South Africa etc) did during the war has not been forgotten. The road that this memorial was located on was called Rue d'Australie!
Thiepval Memorial, dedicated to the missing soldiers. It's horrific how large it is and how many names are on its walls. Even today though, remains keep surfacing from under the ground due to construction or the natural movement of the earth, and they remove that person's name from Thiepval if they can identify them Poppies on the memorial at ThiepvalA picture of soldiers in the trenches, I can't imagine how horrible it would have been during winter with all the mud and the freezing temperatures
The Ulster memorial to Northern Irish soldiersThe Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont Hamel
Trenches at Beaumont Hamel, it's hard to imagine them as they were, quite a bit deeper and obviously with no grass. There aren't many places left where you can see original trenches though, and it was fascinating to see them up close
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