At the GOING DOWN OF THE SUN
100 years on from the end of the First World War, walk to the sombre but beautiful memorials that lie hidden in our countryside…
SPOIGNANT AS OUR town and city war memorials are, it’s perhaps in the landscape where we feel the loss most keenly. It’s partly about what we’re used to. We expect most towns to have a war memorial somewhere prominent; we’re accustomed to seeing them, and on November 11th we know what we will see happening there; particularly this year, as we mark 100 years since the end of what they once called ‘The Great War’. But when you come across a memorial that is threaded into the countryside, it’s a jolt. It demands attention. It causes a pause, as you read the names, and learn why this place was special to them, or why this memorial was put here. And that’s what memorials are often about: a sense of place. The Cenotaph is a fine, dignified focal point for the nation’s Remembrance. But it can’t possibly show you the ordinary lives and localities of the hundreds of thousands who never came back from France and Belgium. The farmers, publicans, grocers and farriers; mill-workers, village doctors, schoolteachers: people who had never set foot in Whitehall or anywhere so grand.
So if you find a memorial in the countryside, you instantly feel the hugeness of the scale, and see how ‘the war to end all wars’ reached across the whole country with its tendrils of fear and grief.
It also shows you what they were fighting for. That view. That greenery. That peace.
It’s a sentiment you can read in Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen, from which we get the famous lines that ‘they shall not grow old’, and ‘at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them’. Elsewhere in the same poem, Binyon says: ‘To the innermost heart of their own land they are known/As the stars are known to the Night.’
So as Britain remembers the souls it lost during the First World War, Country Walking set out to find the landmarks in the landscape: the places where walkers can find a moment of pause to pay their own tribute to people who shared their joy in beautiful places.
To know them in the innermost heart of their own land.