Visiting WW1 excavation DigHill80

Hey all,

As you might remember, back in Fall 2017, 'DigHill80' tried to get an excavation going in the small Belgian town of Wijtschate near Ypres. Preliminary work showed the site held a lot of promise; Untouched since 1918, it was resting in the Flemish soil just waiting to be uncovered. Back then, MHV and I tried to made some noise to get support for the project and many other YTers joined in. Long story short, they got funded and the work commenced some weeks ago.

Today, I visited them and I've got to say I am impressed. Simon, the head archeologist took quite a lot of time to show us around, explained it all, answer questions and gave us the opportunity to film everything. I am very grateful for to him for having done this himself. I am hoping to work on the video in the coming days as we tour our way down to Switzerland, so fingers crossed that the episode can release soon.

One more somber aspect was being confronted with human remains. We obviously did not film those but it really rammed home the fact that we were standing, even though it was exciting to see all this history come to light, on a battlefield. In fact, in only a short time the excavation unearthed 81 soldiers, the vast majority Germans from a Bavarian regiment. With them, they found many personal items helping the authorities to track down their names and relatives (in fact, while we were there they found a soldier's watch and a pink ceramic cup in his haversack, still in perfect condition). The watch itself might have a name inscription while the cup was quite a bizarre yet wonderful find. Now unearthed, this project finally enables us to give them a proper burial. 

Right, that should suffice as a short roundup of what happened today. I could go on and on about the fortification rocks we saw, the 8-inch British Artillery shell found in the ground and the extensive field works. A helpful volunteer James, a Geography student from the University of Coventry, also gave us a short introduction to 'science' behind a trench excavation. But, no more spoilers, you'll see all of that and more in the upcoming video. 

I hope you enjoyed this more lengthy post and as always, thank you very much for your support (we are over here because of you, after all!!!),
Bis