Day 213, Redmires, 1st World War training trenches

Went out with Dad to look at some archaeology on Sunday.  This involved 75 minutes of wandering about at very low speed over sheep infested high ground near Redmires reservoir.  There were tufty, coarse knots of moorland grass to negotiate but that was about it, other than the wind blowing up the valley over the tundra.  This was a free event organised by The University of Sheffield as part of the Festival of Humanities which was to tour the training trenches from the first world war which are still in evidence around Redmires.

Now I’ve been under the weather recently and at first thought all was ok, but by the end of it I ached liked an unsatisfied desire for a chocolate covered peanut, crisp and cheese sandwich.  Dad appeared fine, and so he should, after all he’s only 78 years old and has a dodgy knee.  Me however, well, when I got home I took to my bed like an Edwardian aunt after the loss of her menfolk in bloody slaughter.  Well, not quite.

The remains of the trenches are very distinct.  I've visited the Somme and there is no sign of trench work there other than that which has been deliberately preserved.  A century of farming there has removed all evidence of the trenches.  But here above Sheffield the fields of rough scrub are not really good enough for farming anything other than growing and harvesting sheep.  And so the signs of the trenches, even though they were backfilled when finished with, are still quite clear.

View of Sheffield looking away from and above the trenches

I didn't take any photographs of the trench outlines.  I've seen dozens of photographs of them and none appears to capture the nuance of detail available to the naked eye so I didn't bother.  What a cop-out.  There are a few pictures here, aerial photographs, but they don't give an impression of how many trenches there were and how close they are together.

There are other interesting features on the hills such as the V shaped cooking trenches and the Mills grenade training areas.  The kitchens are composed of a number of shallow trenches where the fire would be laid, these are aligned similar to a V shape and the join was where a single flue was attached.  One of my relatives was wounded while working in one of these types of kitchen.  Even by reducing the number of visible flues this doesn't make the kitchen invisible and the type of cooking facilities used here were soon replaced by mobile kitchens which were more of a moving target.  There are actually two of these types of kitchen on Redmires, the suggestion is that one of the kitchens was for the higher ranks and the other for the lower ranks.

There would have been four companies training here, A-D.  With A being the higher end of the social scale and D being the general riff-raff and proles.  Dad was in D company when he did his National Service, and he said that all of his relatives in previous conflicts had been in D company.  Most of the Sheffield Battalion were drawn from the professional and middle classes, steel workers were dissuaded from joining up as their work was seen as essential.  It was said that the men in the battalion were very strong from the tip of their forefinger to the tip of their adjacent thumb as they were generally "pen-pushers", but they soon toughened up when digging trenches over the winter months.  Either way there's not a great deal of inequality when lying dying in a foreign field, the sacrifice was as great, and the shit you're lying in smells the same whether it originated with company A, B, C, D or the enemy.


Charming.

For official/internal use only:
2322

0-9