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A powerful montage of images from the Academy's 3rd annual tour of the Belgium World War I Battlefields on the 8th - 11th April 2014.

The Academy is rightly proud of Mr McGarrigle and Mrs Warrender who have provided this profound experience to so many of Winsford's young people over the years.

Our party of 30 History students arrived safely in Ypres on the 8th April 2014, following a midnight departure from Winsford and a short ferry crossing from Dover to Calais. Accompanied by Mrs Warrender, Mr McGarrigle and Mr Rawson, the students spent their first day settling into accommodation before visiting the awe-inspiring Menin Gate in the historic setting of Ypres.

The Menin Gate is one of the most visited war memorials in Western Europe. In World War 1, there was no gate like the current memorial at the western end of Ypres. Instead the men who marched to the front to fight in the Battles of Ypres passed through a gap in the town's old ramparts and crossed a small stretch of water.

Many thousands of men passed over this bridge -- many to their deaths -- that it was felt appropriate that after the war a splendid monument should be built to commemorate those who died in battle but had no final resting place. Sir Reginald Blomfield designed the Menin Gate and after his design was approved by the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission). Work was begun in June 1921 with a grant of £150,000 from the British government. It was finished in July 1927.

The land around Ypres is dotted with many cemeteries but these are invariably for those who were killed but were identified and then buried with a headstone named accordingly.

The Menin Gate is for those men whose bodies were never found, all 54,896 men who died between 1914 and 1917 and who have no known grave.

The poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote about the 'gate' that soldiers went through at Ypres in one of his poems:

"Who will remember, passing through this gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?"

Sassoon referred to the Menin Gate as "a sepulchre of crime".

At the inauguration ceremony on July 24th 1927, the buglers of the Somerset Light Infantry sounded the 'Last Post'. Since then the 'Last Post' has been played each night at 8pm. This simple ceremony is done by buglers from the Ypres Fire Brigade. The only time this was not done was during the German occupation of Belgium in World War Two. It was restarted the very night that the Germans left Ypres.

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