We had three full days in the field from Thursday to Saturday. We surveyed a fairly large area to the south of Lone Pine and along a place called Holly Ridge, which was part of the Allied Front Line. The amount of excavation that was done in 1915 is truly mind boggling and it's almost impossible to make head or tail of what exactly you're looking at - other than for some of the main trenches. It gets even more complicated near roads where there has obviously been excavation after the campaign - what are old trenches and what has been caused by more recent excavations - such as ditches to facilitate runoff. Added to that, it is sometimes difficult to establish what are water courses and what are trenches. Sometimes they're one and the same. The undergrowth doesn't help us either sometimes you cler it away very confident there's a trench behind what is being cleared only to find nothing. At other times you don't expect to find a thing and there's a tunnel entrance staring at you. It can be quite frustrating. But the undergrowth clearly is good for trench preervation. The deepest and best preserved always sit under heavy vegetation.

There are tunnel entrances, pits and dugouts everywhere. How they connect to each other, and what they actually are cannot be easly determined until after they're all plotted on the GPS system and then linked together. Overlaying them on contemporaneous maps can also assist immeasurably. But you need a very large scale map to get all the detail you need. we're finding that some of the maps that some people claim are definitive for immediately after the campaign are missing quite a bit of detail.

Today (Sunday) we caught up on much of the documentation that is required on a project like this. It's nearly endless.