Recently arrived home from 6 days on the Somme. This year we cycled and it added a whole new dimension. It is, as ever, a timeless, moving environment. A page on the trip will follow at some point

Have just returned from a short but successful trip to Ypres. The main reason for the trip was to follow the last days of my cousin, Spencer Parkes. This worked well and I was happy to walk the area of his final three days pretty accurately. More on this in Spencer’s pages on this blog. Alongside that we took in some traditional areas, notably Hooge Crater and Messines Ridge (below), the latter was particularly appealing because it was rural, accessible and reminiscent of the area I am much more used to surveying, The Somme.

Significant page update on my maternal grandfather – Eric Walter Hare. https://thesomme.wordpress.com/eric-hare/