On the 6th October 2013 seventy sandbags of soil, collected by children from seventy schools in Belgium and the United Kingdom from Flanders fields were displayed in the Cloth Hall in Ieper. Each bag is marked with the name of a cemetery written in red.
© Karen Ette 2013
At the Remembrance Ceremony on 11th November at the Menin Gate, as the name of each battlefield was read, children carried the sandbags from that location, one-by-one, and helped by the troops, placed them on to an F Troop Gun Carriage of the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery. Whilst they did this, the Band of the Coldstream Guards played Elgar's Nimrod and Henry Purcell’s When I am laid in Earth Remember Me from Dido and Aeneas.
They then began their journey to England and Wellington Barracks where the Flanders Fields Memorial Garden will be created for the Centenary commemorations of the First World War.
To read more about this, please click here and to watch a video of the arrival and see more great photographs - just click here
© Karen Ette 2013
