7th May we had an early flight home from Dublin....and no photos were taken. We left Dublin Saturday morning & got back to Sydney Sunday evening....so it basically took 2 days (with the time difference factored in), so no photos for these 2 days...plus on the Monday, we spent the day driving back home in the central west of NSW...so again no photos this day. So I've decided to use a couple of more shots from our trip in both France & Ireland to fill these days :)
Photo is looking out from the Pozières Windmill site. The original windmill was ruined in the war....but someone had placed this little Aussie windmill at the edge of the site, looking over the ploughed fields beyond.
A bit of history on the Windmill Site:
The Australian War Memorial owns a little piece of France – the Windmill site at Pozières. Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, suggested the purchase because ‘The Windmill site ... marks a ridge more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth’. Over seven weeks in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, the Australian Imperial Force suffered 23,000 casualties, more than 6700 of whom died, in the countryside around the Windmill. On 11 November 1993 soil from the Windmill site was cast over the coffin of Australia’s Unknown Soldier during his funeral at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Just so tragic when you read of the numbers of casualties and deaths from WW1. Very interesting background history and the windmill is a very poignant reminder of what went on there.
