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I had a host of ideas as to what to do with my week long holiday in March 2006, there is barely a place on the planet that I do not wish to visit. In the end I decided to spend the week tracing the history of the Sheffield City Battalion, also know as the "Sheffield Pals", more formally known as the 12th (Service) Battalion, York & Lancaster Regiment.
Why?
I have a fascination with the physical scars that war has left on this country. The two world wars in the 20th century may have been fought in foreign fields, but you don't have to look hard to see the impression they left on the landscape of Sheffield. A gap in a row of terraced houses where a German bomb has fallen, missing iron railings from the front of houses destined in the eyes of their owners to build ships and planes. The Peak District that borders Sheffield is also littered with scars, war time aircraft rot quietly out on the moors. On Lodge Moor you'll find the remnants of a Prisoner of War camp, and nearby on Hallam Moors lie some of Sheffield's most subtle war scars, a series of trenches dug by the Sheffield City Battalion, training for war.
