Foncquevillers, Pozières. Travel by coach at 9.00am from central London to Folkstone for the 35 minute Eurotunnel crossing. Continue by coach arriving in the field mid afternoon. Drive the length of the front line for an initial orientation of the Somme battlefield, identifying the exact positions of the opposing trenches. The lecturer gives an introduction at the windmill site at Pozières, the highest part of the battlefield, and the first poem is read; Alec Waugh’s Albert to Bapaume Road. Visit preserved trenches and a military cemetery. Continue to the hotel in Amiens.

Serre, Mesnil, Thiepval. Explore to the north of the Albert to Bapaume Road. Start at the village of Serre, site of the left flank of the main attack on 1st July where many of the assault battalions were known as ‘pals’, reflecting their recruiting centres based in the large urban cities of the Midlands and the North. Move along the line through Auchenvillers, along the Ancre Valley, with Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen and A.P. Herbert. At Thiepval is the Memorial to the Missing, the most monumental of the many Great War memorials which bears over 72,000 names. Today’s poems include A soldier’s funeral by John William Streets, read at his graveside, Binyon’s For the Fallen and, at Thiepval, Charles Sorley’s When they see the millions of the mouthless dead / Across your dreams in pale battalions go.

Peronne, Longueval, Mametz. Start at the ‘Historial de la Grande Guerre’ museum at Peronne, then to the area south of the Albert to Bapaume Road where some success was achieved on 1st July but at high cost. The site of Siegfried Sassoon’s HQ dugout is near the village of Fricourt, ‘while time ticks blank and busy on their wrists’. At Mametz, on William Noel Hodgson’s ‘familiar hill’, read Before Action: ‘Must say goodbye to all of this / By all delights that I shall miss, / Help me to die, O Lord.’

Contay, Louvencourt. Stray behind the lines, visiting areas associated with the Casualty Clearing Stations. The villages of Louvencourt, Contay and Couin provide locations appropriate to read the choice of women’s poetry, Vera Brittain and May Wedderburn Cannan. At La Boisselle, astride the Roman road, follow the fortunes of two battalions of the 34th Division. The poetry of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Alan Seeger features (I have a rendezvous with death). Final lunch before driving to Calais for the Eurotunnel journey home, arriving in central London at c. 6.30pm.