Traces of History Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
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Reading letters sent home from the trenches, many soldiers describe the Belgian landscape as being similar to England. Gentle rolling fields dotted with sparse farms, narrow lanes and familiar trees. Today the fields have been restored to their pre-war state and farmers tend the crops as they have for a thousand years, for this is an old landscape, briefly disturbed by the war. Our trenches on the German third line remind us of this, evidence of the trenches is mixed with shards of Roman and medieval pottery left by those who called this place home. The older archaeology obliterated by the battle, leaves us wondering if the men who dug these impressive fortifications were aware of these traces of the past; evidence from other sites suggests that some of them were.
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Filed under: A Dig Diary by
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1 Comment »
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It really struck me this year how peaceful the Salient is. Looking at the countryside around Prowse Point and the dig site, you’d be really hard pressed to think that anything so horrendous could ever have occurred in such a timeless and peaceful place. Not only are the larks now singing in the sky again without interruption, the whisper of the wind in the trees is now only punctuated by the occasional dairy herd. Beautiful.