"For a moment the water below him looked like a window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water,' he said with horror. 'Dead faces!' 'I don't know,' said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. 'But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.' " J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of The Rings

Tolkien, a signals officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers, was posted several times to the Somme front between July and October of 1916, and spent much time in the battered trenches in Thiepval Wood, just a few hundred yards from this location, one which would have been very familiar to him. It is clear to see how this desolate, still haunted landscape, must surely have served as inspiration for the marshes of Mordor.