Some final shots of the Somme

Picking my way across a field. Beneath that grass was wet, sticky mud. Behind me is the gigantic crater left by the British army's Hawthorne Ridge mine explosion on 1st July 1916. While those look like large shrubs they are actually the very tops of tall trees growing from the deep crater floor.

Wearing my Armistice Day poppy on my beret.
Our Australian flag. No, we didn't desecrate it - on the contrary, we flew it proudly from our car aerial for 3 days, and this was all that was left by the time we returned the car at Lille. We left little bits of it all over the Somme...sort of poetic, isn't it?
...and some shots of the extraordinary beauty of the Somme today. I was particularly taken by the tracery of the bare tree branches everywhere, as well as the autumn colours on those that remained.