The grave detectives

My wife and I, both in our late seventies, have always loved walking, mostly along canals. In later years this had got less and less, until lockdown, when we walked in our local country parks and got a subscription to Country Walking. What an inspiration it has been.

We saw the 1000-mile challenge and decided to have a go, but weren’t sure how much we could do. Some 700 miles in and we are still going strong!

As we love history, we decided to link the walks with visits to Commonwealth War Grave sites. This has led us to uncovering some fantastic stories, including the grave of a Victoria Cross holder just a few miles from our home. Not all war graves are the standard design – some are family graves and these take more finding. Any we feel are of interest we do more research on and we have brought some of the stories of these brave men and women to life.

We hope in covering the next 300 miles we can come up with more interesting discoveries.

Mike Cherry, email