Year 9 Trip to Belgium March 2008

2 April 2008

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From Friday 28th to Sunday 30th March Year 9 paid a 3 day visit to the World War 1 battlefields at Ypres in Belgium and the Somme in France.They visited the largest British Military cemetery - Tyne Cot - containing the graves of nearly 12,000 British war dead as well as a wall containing a further 30,000 names of the missing.

From there it was a short coach journey to the Menin Gate where the Last Post Ceremony takes place at 8pm, every day of the year. On the walls are thousands of names of fallen soldiers with no known grave.

They also visited the Somme battlefields in northern France, the enormous Lochnargar crater, the Thiepval Memorial, the German cemetery at Langemarck and the unique Hill 62 or Sanctuary Wood site which houses a collection of war memorabilia as well as preserved trenches.