Walking the ground.

I drove past road signs to Naseby the other day and it got me thinking about battlefields I've walked round.  Not very many to be honest and all in England at that! 

So what is it about walking the ground? I'd say I'm quite unimaginative generally but give me a battlefield and it comes to life!  You can read book after book  but to stand at the hedge where Okey's Dragoons  fired  into the Royalist cavalry flanks at Naseby and understand the terrain is something else.  The very streets of St Albans were the battlefield at the First Battle of St Albans during the Wars of the Roses in 1455 and  the road  layout and  alot of the buildings  still exist! 

You can still find your way round the Battle of Barnet (1471) and understand why certain things happened the way they happened. It's my ambition to walk more battlefields in the UK & in Europe. With such a wealth of records available now I could find  where my Grandad was on the first day of the Somme in 1916, I could walk the ground at Bullecourt where Tara's Grt Uncle disappeared on 3rd May 1917 and of course I'd love to see and explore the D-Day beaches plus the earlier battles like Waterloo, Agincourt, Crecy et al.

Walking the ground is vitally important to grasp and understand what happened, not to mention the fact that in no small measure you are walking the path of heroes. There's really nothing like it!