The Somme: Thiepval, Lochnagar and Beaumont-Hamel

Required Activities

• Walk right through the 25 m central arch of Lutyens's memorial at Thiepval, counting the sixteen Portland stone piers that carry the names, read the dedication on the frontispiece to the French and British armies, and come out into the cemetery behind it where 300 French and 300 Commonwealth dead lie facing each other

• Walk the whole rim of the Lochnagar Crater at La Boisselle — about 140 m across the outside of the lip and 21 m deep — and work out from the edge what 27 tonnes of ammonal did at 7.28 in the morning on 1 July 1916

• At Beaumont-Hamel, walk St John's Road trench out to the reconstructed Danger Tree and pace the 275 m of open ground to the German line that the Royal Newfoundland Regiment crossed in about thirty minutes on 1 July 1916, losing 801 of 865 men; then climb the Caribou mound to Basil Gotto's bronze and read the 820 names on the three plaques at its foot

• In Delville Wood at Longueval, find the Last Tree — the single hornbeam that survived the shelling — follow the named rides by the stones cut at each crossing, and read the wall of remembrance added in 2016 with the names of 14,000 South African dead of all ethnicities; of the 3,200 men of the brigade that fought here, 143 came out of the trenches unhurt