Somme: Albert-Bapaume Road

Posted on January 25, 2025 by

19 Comments

Is there a ‘culture’ surrounding The Old Front Line? One that helps define it and enables us to understand that landscape of the First World War? If so, what is it, and how can we understand it? In this episode we take a major pathway across the Western Front battlefields: the Albert-Bapaume Road on the Somme, and we discuss what the this ‘culture’ of The Old Front Line might be.

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BATTLEFIELD MAP:

Category: Podcast Episode, Somme

19 Comments on “Somme: Albert-Bapaume Road”

  1. Enjoyed this as always Paul. More places to put on my visit list!

    Hopefully one day soon I’ll be driving down that road.

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  2. Very interesting again Paul, I pick up on the ‘culture’ I have often driven up & down that road in the last few years either on my own or with colleagues, as soon as I pass that big factory complex on the right from Bapuame (what is it ?) I get the same familiar feeling that I get in Ypres – that I’m somehow at ‘home’. Thanks again for taking me back there from my lounge 👍

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      • Yes the ‘home’ feeling is something I’ve felt on my trips to Ypres particularly and that was years before I found out that my grandfather served at Ypres with the Essex Yeomanry and he survived the war but I never knew him.

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      • My coach got stopped there a couple of years back by a cycle race got talking to the gendarmes on the road block I was told it is a seed and grain store, the big building has large grain silos.

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  4. Paul you mentioned Tom Easton of the Tyneside Scottish. Would he be the same Tom Easton that has a small memorial cross alongside the Lochnagar crater – well it was there several years back when I visited.

    Great episode as ever

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  5. Fantastic podcast once again Paul. I’m laying by a pool in Thailand, relaxing but longing to get back on the bike around the Western Front in the Spring/Summer, mainly inspired by your knowledge and enthusiasm.

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  6. Thanks for an excellent podcast Paul. In 2023 I walked from the Hotel de la Paix in Albert to the Butte de Warlancourt (and back !) and I was struck how close the outskirts of Bapaume was from the Butte. For the attacking troops it must have seemed tantalisingly close when the Somme Offensive was eventually wound down.

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  7. Thank you Paul for this. Just caught up on the web. You wouldn’t have any postcards or similar of Destramont Farm? Regards

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