Trench 3 exploits - on the edge!

What a great week! Here are some pics and my experience of Trench 3.

We made a good start with Dan and Sue hard at work but it's all too much for Bex who needs a sit down.

Felix and Joel do some filming for ABC while Steve encourages the boys digging with a song(?). Hang on - is that Mat actually working in the trench?! Surely not when he's just had his nails done! Our Belgian diggers look on from behind our mounting and long barrow like spoil heap...

Steve shows our trench finds to the WWI re-enactment guys when they visit the site. Very spooky!

More filming by the ABC guys with Martin and Richard (check out the uniform!), the Auzzie boys (Mat and Mike), our geophys whizz Peter aka"the Colonel" and Gantrand, our Belgian EOD guy, at hand to deal with any volatile divas!

Last but not least - the hard core of the team on Friday afternoon, still digging and still smiling! Steve is in the Auzzie recut of the German frontline trench. The Auzzie trench measurements matched the historic records exactly.

And finally...

Since the dig I have been enthused to find out more about my family in the Great War. My Grandad, born 1897, joined the Leicesters PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry as my dad calls it) in 1914 at the age of 17 and spent the entire war either in France or Belgium. He was one of the very lucky ones who came home, and went on to also "survive" WWII as part of the British Expeditionery Force. I now hope to do some more digging (of the research kind) to find out where the Leicesters went and therefore what he might have experienced. I may even have trodden in his footsteps last week!