Flanders poppy joins soldiers’ war carvings
than 80ft across has been unveiled at the Wiltshire landmark which once housed a huge military training camp.
The badge was carved for the Fovant Badges Society by volunteers. The workers marked the outline of the badge by removing the turf and a little topsoil, then filled it with chalk quarried from another site.
“I always see the badges as a message to the future from the past,” said Richard Bullard, of the Fovant Badges Society.
“When you look at them, you think of those young soldiers up on the hill who were thinking ‘I wonder if they will still remember us, I wonder if they will still be here?’
“I think of ordinary people like me up on the hillside chatting, having a cigarette and thinking ‘We are going to France, we want to put a permanent mark here’.”
Mr Bullard said the badges reflected the huge sacrifice of British and Commonwealth troops during the First World War and the way the conflict had permanently changed British communities.
As many as 20 regimental badges were originally carved into the hillside, which now lies alongside the A30 between Salisbury and Shaftesbury.
The first, of the London Rifle Brigade, was carved in 1916 and was quickly followed by others from British and Commonwealth units as they passed through the camp.
Most have since become grown over, but five from the First World War survive, including the City of London Rifles, Australian Commonwealth Military Forces, Post Office Rifles and the Devonshire Regiment. A further two were carved just after the Second World War by members of Fovant Home Guard, with another created in 1970 by The Royal Corp of Signals. Kristian Strutt, from the University of Southampton, said that while chalk hill figures appear to be a permanent and unchanging part of the English landscape, they in fact need constant attention or will quickly grow over. Aerial photographs show that some of the Fovant badges were lost by the middle of the last century.
The figures are cut by digging the outline and then filling it with chalk pieces taken from a quarry.
Mr Strutt, the leader of an archaeology project investigating the site as the new badge is built, said: “Whether or not they were fully aware of what was awaiting them, with hindsight, the fact that they were cutting these badges is quite poignant.”
Mr Strutt and students from the university have surveyed the site to ensure the new badge did not destroy any archaeological treasures that might have been in the area. Settlements in the region date back to the Iron Age.
At the time the first badges were cut, the area housed a military camp containing tens of thousands of troops as they trained and prepared for deployment across the Channel.