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A very welcome beer and a sandwich in Bapaume - allied objective of the Battle of the Somme, but never reached - then back to the centre of the battlefield. Montauban, in the southern part of the British sector, fell to the well trained and imaginatively led 18th and 30th Divisions on July 1st. Quarry CWGC Cemetery lies in a hollow on the lane leading from the village to Bazentin. It is surrounded by walls of soft red bricks and knapped flint, the latter gathered, like those who reside within it, from the surrounding fields, and thereby bears some familiar reference to the English churchyard. It is beautifully kept, the flower beds freshly planted, the newly mown grass thick and rich, and bouncy beneath your feet. The sun has broken through, and the afternoon has become soft and warm. It feels peaceful, and oddly cosseting. I notice that there is a group of German graves, as carefully tended as those of their former enemies around them. One of them bears a familiar name, but I have never established if there is a connection.

The lane leads to the Bazentin crossroads, an intersection of five lanes that lies amongst the German second line. Taken in the nightime attack of 14th July, the valley in front of it became a concentration point for troops attacking the infamous High Wood in the ensuing two, horrendous, months. Despite being in the lee of the Bazentin ridge, it was not a place of refuge, thoroughly ranged by German artillery, and subjected to random barrages night and day. The Calvary facing the Montauban road is a survivor of the battle, the figure of Christ pierced and ruptured by shrapnel balls and shell fragments.

I follow a crop tramline in the wheat along the face of the wood, back towards the hammerhead. It is intermittently drizzling, and the grey clouds scud northwards. The brooding wood beside me really does have a presence, the fringe is dark, and solid, and looms over you. This is the ground that the Welshmen of the 38th Division crossed in their second attempt on the wood, on the 10th July. David Jones was here. Exactly here.

‘And now the gradient runs more flatly toward the seperate scarred saplings, where they make fringe for the interior thicket and you take notice.
There between the thinning uprights at the margin
straggle tangled oak and and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch whose silver queenery is draggled and ungraced
and June shoots lopt
and fresh stalks bled
runs the Jerry trench.
And cork-screw stapled trip-wire
to snare among the briars
and iron warp with bramble weft
with meadow-sweet and lady’s smock
for a fair camouflage.’

So too was Wyn Griffith, sent down by HQ at Pommiers Redoubt later in the afternoon, to try to reestablish contact with the troops in the wood;

"I passed through two barrages before I reached the Wood, one aimed at the body, and the other at the mind. The enemy was shelling the approach from the South with some determination, but I was fortunate enough to escape injury and to pass on to an ordeal ever greater. Men of my old battalion were lying dead on the ground in great profusion. They wore a yellow badge on their sleeves, and without this distinguishing mark, it would have been impossible to recognize the remains of many of them. I felt that I had run away."

It was here, on this wide, open field, that Wyn Griffith's younger brother, a runner, fell to the barrage whilst carrying a message back, one that had been written by Wyn Griffith himself, a tragedy that surely haunted the older man for all of his years.

The ground undulates more than you would expect. You can see gentle hollows that might have afforded some cover from the raking machine-gun fire. But not from the black shrapnel, or the snipers high up in the trees. I reach an old field boundary that runs part of the way from the wood back to the track in happy valley. I sit down briefly, low in the tall, damp grass, and look back along the face of the wood, across the killing field. It is difficult to describe the thrill of suddenly finding youself walking in the precise footsteps of these figures whose words, so often read, have attained for them an almost mythical status. I feel charged with endorphin, thrilled and simultaneously exhausted, drained. How could such appalling violence have thrashed against this peaceful, sylvan place? But then now could it not have, it seeps from the soil's memory, and that of the dark trees. It will always be there. Another squall crosses the shallow valley, and I follow the tramlines back to the track, chilled in the damp breeze.

And so, finally, to Mametz Wood, the place that has haunted my dreams, and driven this project, since I first, and last, came here a decade ago. Then, lagging behind the tour party, I had walked quietly across the grass sward to the fringe of the wood, and crept a few feet into the thicket. Stuck all morning on a coach, I needed a pee, and, childishly, felt it my loyal duty to water the German trench. You shouldn't be fippant with ghosts. The silence wasn't normal, it was almost crushing, physical, hostile, and alarming. I stumbled back out of the wood. It was still a beautiful, soft May morning, and I could see my party in the distance walking along the track towards Flat Iron Cemetery, but I felt quite remote from them, and as I walked, faster now, diagonally across the gentle sward upon which so many of those young Welshmen had died 90 years before, I could feel my hairs on my neck prickling, and I imagined a thousand eyes piercing my back.

The track to Flat Iron Copse. The Welsh attacked from right to left onto the face of 'the hammerhead' on 4th July. Caught by enfilade machine-gun fire from Flat Iron, and direct fire from the face of the wood, the attack was, to use terminology common at the time, cut to ribbons. The track, and the valley (variously 'Happy' and 'Death' Valley) subsequently became a main route for supplies and men going up to the front, and was well marked by German artillery. It was on its shattered surface that the terribly wounded Robert Graves was bounced into agonised consciousness as he was taken back in a horse-drawn GS wagon.

And now, on another, more sultry, gloomy May morning, having learned that many others have experienced an identical sense of threat and foreboding, here, I am going to go back into the ("stretched long laterally, and receded deeply") dark wood. Alone. In search of David Jones of course, and Sassoon, and Robert Graves, and Wyn Griffith. And so I find myself walking across a line in the crop - the grass is gone now - and somewhat tentatively setting foot into the gloom. There has been logging, and a rough, muddy track curves through the ivy-choked shellholes at the entrance. A relative has pinned a photograph of a long-dead great-uncle or grandfather to a tree, with a single paper poppy on a tiny wooden cross. The birds are singing, the air is clear. I reach a patch where the loggers have cleared some the trees, and the undergrowth, and the naked, shallowed shellholes are clearly visible. I expect people, but they are not working today. I reach the strange recess in the trees that forms the neck of the hammerhead, there in David Jones's map, still there today. I can see the sky above me. Someone, or something, behind me shouts, or screams, just once, the sound puncturing the silence and making my heart thrash. Was it a dog? I hold my ground, and walk on. I want to suspect a fox, but I am not sure. The track leads further into the wood, and an open patch beckons ahead. I am not meant to be here. I reach the patch of light, an intersection of two tracks. Logging, last year, has opened it up slightly, and some of the young tree boughs hang down, their heavy new growth unsupported by departed neighbours. Wyn Griffith. This is it.

"I reached a cross-ride in the wood where four lanes broadened into a confused patch of destruction. Fallen trees, shell holes, a hurried trench beginning and ending in an uncertain manner, abandoned rifles, broken branches with their sagging leaves, an unopened box of ammunition, sandbags half-filled with bombs, a derelict machine gun propping up the head of an immobile figure in uniform, with a belt of ammunition drooping from the breech into a pile of red-stained earth - this is the livery of war."

My head is spinning, a peculiar sense of elation. I take just one photograph, and walk against his footsteps back down the main ride. The floor of the wood is pockmarked by shellholes, the dying remains of this month's bluebells scattered liberally through them. A section of corrugated iron elephant shelter leans against a tree, a tangible relic of the battle. I reach the southern end of the ride, where Griffith had ventured briefly from the track to 'escape a heavy shelling', but had been forced back onto it by the dense, impenerable thicket. A few more photos, and then I am out, out into the sultry daylight, the solid wall of lush green from which I have just burst snapping shut behind me, and brooding over me. But I am not frightened any more, not this time anyway.

The site of the Mill at Pozières offers little, as it is too neatly preened. I once saw a beautiful old photograph of it with the wind blowing through long, mid-summer grass, an ash tree on the corner of the site, the shell craters on the low mound a mystery waiting to be discovered, but no longer. Neatness and order have, sadly, triumphed. So back down to Ovillers-la-Boisselle. I want to photograph 'Mash Valley', the scene of the massacre of the 34th Division on 1st July, but it too offers little today, and many of the new houses beside the Roman Road grate against the aesthetic sensibilities. Maybe another time. The bare, recently drilled earth beyond the deeply mined 'Glory Hole' crater field at the foot of the village, where the opposing lines almost touched each other, reveals the evidence of more filled-in craters in the form of large, circular white chalk marks, but I fail to properly consider the composition, and an opportunity is blighted. The Glory Hole itself is largely concealed behind fences and rough scrub, private and invisible to the passer-by. I don't go to Lochnagar this time, having visited in 2003. The crater iself is too photographed already. Mametz Wood, and David Jones, calls.

Before I get there I find Quandrangle Wood and the scene of Siegfried Sassoon's one-man foray into the German held Wood Trench in front of Mametz Wood. Quadrangle Copse itself has a lure, the curious intruder concealed by the dank morning and May's lush vegetation. There is a hut just inside the entrance, which startles, but it is empty, and quiet. The centre of the copse conceals a deep collapsed working, or a series of large craters. The former is perhaps the more likely, for the craters are huge, and there was no mining here, but I can find no account which mentions it. The thick weeds in the crater grab at your feet, and damp leaves smite your face. It feels airless, the skin prickles, and I am glad to be back out on the road.

Quadrangle Wood, looking towards the British advance. David Jones's 'gentle slopes' are visible to the right of the wood. I am standing roughly on the line of Quadrangle Trench, which ran down to the left in the direction of Mametz Wood.

I drive over to Ovillers-la-Boisselle, and onto the Roman Road, through Pozieres towards Le Sars, the axis of the battle. I am trying to get the lie of the land. At Pozières Mill, point 160, the highest point on the Somme battlefield, stands the Tank Memorial. Behind me lies the Australian battlefield, those benighted acres 'more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any place on earth', in front that of the Canadians. The memorial stands on the line of the German OG2 trench, finally captured by the Australians on the 5th week of the battle, and the start line for the Canadians on 9th September, the first day of the tanks. The Canadian troops were ordered to take no prisoners, and in the heat of the advance, many surrendering Germans needlessly died, each another small tragedy in a vast universe of tragedies. A tank, C5 'Creme de Menthe' commanded by Capt Arthur Inglis of the Gloucesters, had lurched forward from this exact spot to attack a sugar beet factory two or three hundred yards down what had been, and is again, the road. The factory held a number of machine-gun posts which were holding up the advance, and the tank is said to have drawn up to the ruins and fired its guns through a window, forcing the terrified garrison into submission.

A soft mist has settled on this high ground, and the photograph that I take looking along the road towards the trees that make the ghost of the long vanished factory, will be the first of the project.

The memorial features four finely detailed bronze models of the first tanks. One of them holds a .50 calibre bullet, left by a P51 Mustang or a P47 Thunderbolt strafing a retreating German column in another war.