


Trench Ghosts part 4
Langemark A few trench ghosts I did last week then got distracted and forgot about. One of Langemark and one of the Sugarloaf salient at Fromelles. The Langemark rephoto leaps out straight away. It’s also familiar to anyone that’s ever visited the German...
Aerial ghosts: Messines updated
I had a very interesting email today from Gil Bossuyt of frontaaltours.com which has prompted this post. Gil has been looking at the image I originally colourised in this piece. It goes thus: “I went searching on trench maps to recognize some road structures,...
WW1: Aerial Trench Ghosts Part 3 – Lens
Someone asked if I’d done any Loos aerials, I hadn’t, it’s not an area I’m hugely familiar with, it does tend to get forgotten in between all the noise about the Battle of the Somme and The Ypres Salient. There’s plenty of front in...
Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son
There’s a focus, out there. You’ll see it in most cemeteries on the old front. The famous dead, the men, and boys who achieve some infamy by dint of their bravery, age or circumstances. Sometimes it’s a footballer who scored big in 1912 before...
Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood
Bernafay Wood After Carnoy the cloud started to drop, a shield of it obliterated the sun. Within twenty minutes the light had almost completely failed, the air filled with prickles of moisture. It took a good hour to lift as the edge of a small front slid in from the...
Vanishing point: Courcelette
I’ve been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious enmeshed world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually...
Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I’m trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn’t, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click....
Lost in a landscape: Hardingham – four crosses
There are axis of travel in our existence, roads that we use often at various times that become embedded into us a part of our journey through life. Well worn paths that aren’t exactly desire lines, they are the things that link us together, part of our familial...
Lost boys: Sid Northrop
I recently rediscovered this. It was something I’d put on Flickr. It is the tale of another family member and his last few days and hours in the Great War. We visited the panel he is remembered on at Tyne Cot a couple of years ago. He was my grandmother Jesse...
Great War: Verdun in postcards
Fort Vaux – Artillery observation post. A century on from events. These are in fact a post-war set of tourist cards I bought as part of an album at a flea market in France. These are basically Verdun through a lens from some time after everything had been...