Walking the Western Front by Rebecca Ford

We had been walking for about an hour when we came to a recently ploughed field. The heavy clay soil was deep yellow and lay in clumps, like sticky clots of butterscotch that have gone furry from lying too long in a coat pocket. My guide left the path and started walking through the field, his eyes scanning the ground carefully. Within a few moments he gave a triumphant yell and bent down. I hurried over to see what he had found and he placed a small metal object in my hand. I looked down and there, in my palm, was a broken bullet thickly covered in verdigris. A minute or two later and he had collected several pieces of coiled wire, some shrapnel pellets and two chunks from a shell casing.

It is almost ninety years since the end of the First World War but, as I found when I walked along the old Western Front earlier this year, the countryside in France and Flanders is still recovering from the fighting. Every year, in what is known as the Iron Harvest, farmers dig up thousands of tons of old shells and gas canisters. Sometimes they dig up bodies as well: soldiers whose bodies slipped into the mud that choked the battlefields and simply disappeared. Walking is the perfect way to explore this area as it allows you to see details on the ground that would otherwise be missed - and after all, most of the soldiers travelled on foot.

I started my journey in Ypres in Belgium, also known by its Flemish name, Ieper. The town, which was known as Wipers to the Tommies, is a good base from which to explore the Western Front in Flanders. Close to the centre of town you can join the Ieper canal and walk along the towpath to Essex Farm Cemetery. This is the spot where John McCrae, a Canadian Medical Officer scribbled the famous poem which begins: In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row.....


Poppies were the first flowers to bloom after a battle, their brilliant scarlet petals leading the soldiers to imagine that they grew from the blood of their dead comrades. It was McCrae's poem which helped to establish the poppy as the symbol of remembrance. If you carry on down the path you come to a stretch of canal which was once No Man's Land - the only thing separating the German from the British trenches. It is hard to believe that they were so close.

The next day, on a walk just to the east of Ypres, I found some real trenches behind a little cafe/museum at Sanctuary Wood. They are completely untouched and give the strange impression that they have only been temporarily abandoned by the soldiers, who might return at any moment. A fossilised tree, the only one left standing after the war, bears testament to the devastation wrought on the landscape.

Wherever the soldiers went they gave their own names to the land such as Dirty Bucket Corner, Clapham Junction, Shrapnel Corner. They often anglicised the Flemish names as well and the Belgians will often use these WW1 terms when giving you directions, which can get a bit confusing when you're looking at a map which only has Flemish names on it. Ploegsteert Wood, for example, was known as 'Plugstreet' to the soldiers. It was around Ploegsteert and the villages of St Yvon and Mesen that many of the famous Christmas truces between British and German soldiers took place. Men gathered in No Man's Land, sang carols, swapped presents and even played a game of football. The authorities of course, were quick to discourage such fraternisation.

Wherever you travel along the old Western Front there are war cemeteries, the most visible reminder of the carnage that took place. Many of them sit by the roadside, but there are also smaller ones tucked away in woods and even next to people's gardens. You are most likely to discover them if you are walking and they are always worth exploring - and full of atmosphere. The path through Ploegsteert Wood for instance, leads you past fragments of WW1 barbed wire fencing to Rifle House Cemetery. I went in and as I clicked the gate I felt as if the dead were silently greeting me. I walked among the rows of identical white gravestones, the only sound being the hum of an emerald dragonfly zipping past my face. Then one grave in particular caught my eye, not for the soldier's name but his age - just 15.

Flanders of course is famously flat - that's why every piece of raised ground was of great strategic importance in the war and was fiercely fought for. This gives the landscape a stark simplicity, whether around the battle sites to the east of Ypres, or the hopfields to the west around Poperinge. Views seem to stretch forever, dominated by those sweeping skies that you see in paintings by the Dutch masters. Consequently the walking is by no means challenging, but this does not mean that it should be hurried. Everywhere you go you are treading in the footsteps of the soldiers - on their trenches, their battlegrounds, perhaps even their undiscovered graves.

From Ypres I made my way to Fromelles in France. The village was right on the front line, as is evident from the concrete 'pill boxes' and bunkers that sit incongruously in gardens, covered by clematis and creeper. I met my guide who took me first to a field, in the corner of which is an overgrown bunker. It looks unremarkable until he tells me that a young German Corporal used to deliver messages to this spot when he was stationed here in WW1. His name was Corporal Hitler.

Once again the land is flat, the skyline only punctuated by the occasional church spire. We pass hens scratching in the dust outside a barn and hear a dog barking mournfully in the distance. I realise that walking on perfectly flat paths - and they are mostly tarmac both in France and Flanders - can make your knees and shins ache. But my attention is soon diverted by a field of poppies, their crimson petals fluttering beneath a statue of an Australian soldier carrying a wounded comrade over his shoulder. A friend of my guide's goes past and, on hearing that I am interested in the First World War, offers to show me his discoveries in a nearby field. They turn out to be an intriguing series of dug outs, filled not only with mud but also the odd can of corned beef. At the entrance to one a soldier has carved his name. I wonder what happened to him.

One of the best places to walk on the Western Front is in the Somme, where the countryside is less flat and takes on the gently rolling appearance of the downs in southern England. There is a cruel irony in this given the huge numbers of British soldiers buried here - the towering Thiepval memorial is carved with the names of 72,085, mainly British, men who died here and whose bodies were never found.

Of course there are plenty of walks you can do around the battlefields but it is also worth straying behind the old front line into the sleepy Somme valley, an area which is rarely explored by visitors. The river Somme is one of the most sluggish that I have seen. It splits into tributaries and forms islets - in some places I half expected a crocodile to lumber out of the water towards me.

Eventually this lazy river works its way out to the Bay of the Somme and the pretty village of St Valery, where William the Conqueror set sail for England to fight an earlier battle. Here, great sandy salt flats stretch before you providing some lovely walks and a great chance to spot birds such as avocets, egrets, redshank, storks, spatula birds and numerous ducks. The area has a clean, freshly washed beauty and the light constantly changes. One moment it can be dark and brooding, the next grey and sullen, then suddenly the sun will spear the clouds and the sands take on an eerie clarity. It is important to check your route before you set off as the tide is deceiving and people drown every year, unaware of the danger swirling towards them. The Bay of the Somme seems a million miles from the battlefield sites of the front line, but the war has still left its mark. At Noyelles sur Mer there is a cemetery with the graves of 849 Chinese labourers who were drafted in to do labouring work and who died from disease.

One of the problems with walking in both France and Flanders is that, when you ask for information, people cannot believe that you really want to walk, rather than cycle or go in the car. One man pointed out an 8km route around Passchendaele in Flanders, then looked aghast when he realised that I intended to walk. "But," he spluttered anxiously "you would have to be a trained walker to do that." However there are plenty of walks you can follow, although often directions are not in English. Most paths are very straight but don't go heading off across the fields to vary your walk without permission, there isn't the same right of access here as there is in Britain. But these are minor points. Walking the Western Front may not be the most demanding walk of your life, but it will certainly be the most moving.