Peter Chasseaud at Plugstreet, August 2008

Part I. Drawings. All copyright Peter Chasseaud 2008. NB: These were done in the rain, using soft pencil on thin layout paper, so they were wet and crinkly. They look very grey here because I've had to manipulate the images for them to show up sufficiently. Still, it gives a good impression of some of the weather conditions!

Part II. Photographs. All copyrighht Peter Chasseaud 2008 unless otherwise attributed.

Dawn at Ultimo Trench, German front line, 7th August, after the first thunderstorm. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Willows and pond west of Prowse Point. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Farm dated 1921 (date inscribed on stone below bricked-up window), behind British front lines west of Anton's Farm. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Old photo of the windmill at Spanbroekmolen (now the site of a huge water-filled mine crater, blown on 7th June 1917). This site is south-west of Wytschaete. The photo is being used as part of an interpretation panel at the site. Source of photo unknown.

Contemporary trench art 1? Installation by Peter Chasseaud. Barbed-wire screw picket inserted in a cleft in a tree, Ultimo Crater, St Yvon. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Contemporary trench art 2? Rat on a culvert at Le Gheer, just east of Ploegsteert Wood and south of Le Pelerin and the Birdcage. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Willow tree at Bunhill Row, north side of Ploegsteert Wood. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Contemporary trench art 3? The goggle-eyed booger with the tit. Fence post near Bunhill Row, north side of Ploegsteert Wood. Photo Peter Chasseaud.

Peter Chasseaud at dawn at Ultimo Trench, on the German front line of 1914-1917, near the spot where the remains of an Australian soldier (presumably a casualty of the attack on 7th June 1917) were found. Three of us were on site (relieving two others) during the night (and what a thunderstorm - luckily the remaining 1917 mines nearby at the Birdcage didn't go off!) to guard the remains until they could be properly recorded and excavated). The red glow in the sky at the left of the picture is the sunrise over Warneton, to the east. Photo courtesy of Henry Daniels.

As last year, my landscape (and phenomenology) work during the week (3rd to 9th August) was divided between the terrain of the wider context and that of the immediate site of the dig being conducted by the No Man's Land group of archaeologists, led by Martin Brown and Richard Osgood of Defence Estates, MOD.

My work consisted of field-walking, drawing, photography and writing, and I will be producing more artwork and writing over the next few weeks. I will be posting some of the results here.

I made two wider walks:

1) along the old German front line and its mining sites and craters from Wytschaete southward past Messines to Ploegsteert Wood, Le Pelerin and Le Gheer, taking in Maedelstede Farm, Peckham, Spanbroekmolen, Kruisstraat, Ontario Farm, La Petite Douve Farm, Trench 127, Trench 122 (Ultimo Trench and Factory Farm, sites of the dig), and The Birdcage.

2) a circumnavigation of the dark continent of Ploegsteert Wood, with forays into the interior (there are few public paths, and none that goes right through from east to west.

I saw a huge amount of wildlife - notably herons, hares, rats, partridges, moorhens and geese - and, following on from my project of last year, a large number of willow trees - particularly pollards.

More to follow.

Peter Chasseaud working at Ploegsteert, Belgium

Two photos of me drawing at the Ploegsteert site in July/August 2007. Both photos courtesy of Richard Osgood. The top photo was taken looking south over Ultimo Crater. I am sitting on the southern lip of the crater, looking south over Factory Farm. The Bottom photo shows me sitting at the north-east lip of Ultimo Crater, making a panorama drawing of the view to the east towards Warneton. I am talking to Martin Brown who, with Richard Osgood, organised the dig.

Peter Chasseaud artist in residence at Ploegsteert, Belgium

I will be in Belgium from 28 July to 4 August 2007 (apart from a quick return to England for 1 August to see Tristan and Isolde at Glyndebourne), at St Yvon near Ploegsteert, as artist in residence at an archaeological dig run by a group called No Mans Land.

The dig is just east of Ploegsteert Wood, a place I recently visited as part of my Willows project (see elsewhere in this blog). It focuses on the British and German front line trenches of 1914-1917, the 'no man's land' between them, and two huge mine craters blown in 1917 at Factory Farm and Ultimo Trench.

To the artist and writer Davis Jones, who served in this sector with the 'flash-spotters' of 2nd Field Survey Company, Royal Engineers, Ploegsteert (and also the Ypres Salient) was the mythical 'Broceliande' of the Arthurian legends. The job of the 'flash-spotters' was to locate enemy artillery batteries by taking intersections on their flashes when they fired. They relied on elevation to gain observation from church towers, windmills, hills, etc. In this area the great eminence of the Kemmelberg was vital for British observation, and also the lesser heights of Hill 63 and the hill at Neuve Eglise.

Ploegsteert Wood was an incredible warren of tracks, dugouts, headquarters, billets, reserve trenches (like the dugouts built above ground level as sandbag breastworks to keep above the high water-table). The clay soil in Flanders drains very poorly, and water (and related willow trees) is a significant landscape feature.

Visible and invisible:
I shall be making a close study of the landscape, including elements of visibility and intervisibility. I shall also bear in mind the invisible - the trenches near the surface, some of which the archaeologists will reveal, and the mine shafts and galleries which lie much deeper.

The air photo (conventional orientation with north at the top), taken in June 1915, shows the opposing trench lines with no man's land in between. Ploegsteert Wood is on the left, and at the top are the moated farms known to the British as Hull's Burnt Farm (left, to the west of the British front line) and Factory Farm (right, with the German front line trench running through it).