Riding off the main highway today around the back roads on the Slovenia / Italian border I came across an abandoned fortification which was once part of the great Alpine Wall. This fortification was built in the lead up to WWII at the order of Benito Mussolini to protect Italy from her neighbhours the defences comprises two central areas with bunkhouses and kitchens and two opposing circular machine gun posts with metal fixings for heavy machine guns giving a possible almost circular field of fire. Although the main doors had been removed to this Type A Zone of Resistance fortification I could clearly envisage the determination required to get through the two blast doors and the meters of reinforced concrete.

I had heard about the ‘Iron Harvest’ before visiting the WW1 battle fields but have been shocked at the sheer volume of shells casings and shrapnel fragments all over the landscape. The urge to walk into a field and look for “rusty bits” like lumps of iron shell casing, shrapnel balls or bits of equipment is hard to resist. Although the fighting in the northern front stopped over 90 years ago, there is still a large quantity of WW1 ammunition, artefacts and explosives in the Salient. During World War I an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front and as many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In Ypres an estimated 300 million of the 1.4 billion projectiles that the British and the Germans forces fired at each other during World War One failed to explode and most of them have not been recovered. Today I was advised that in 2013 alone 160 tonnes of munitions were unearthed from the areas around Ypres.