Digging With the Durand Group

Today my shoulders and right arm are rather sore and stiff. I spent my day-off yesterday digging away with the Durand Group in a ravine on the Newfoundland Memorial Site. They're looking for entrances into German tunnels that they know to exist in this area.

Outfitted with "wellies," hardhat, and coveralls, I had the chance to muck around in the mud with a colourful bunch of Brits. Most are military/war historians (either by profession or by hobby), and many are military or retired military. Anti-terrorism experts and a variety of military engineers working for NATO were among the lot. Needless to say, I learned a lot.

As we dug, we regularly found shrapnel pellets and the odd bullet, which were ALL passed on to me. "There you go, another souvenir for the family!" I now have more shrapnel than I know what to do with (and it doesn't take much).

I was busy with one group prepping a site for them to start digging into on a later day. We removed the sod off the hillside and then removed the topsoil, digging a little further down into the chalk to get a sense of the composition of the earth at that spot. What we found below the topsoil were indications that this spot had been filled-in at some point.

A little further down the ravine they were digging at another spot. Right before I left that day they had come upon quite a bit of timber and what seemed to be a wooden floor (which could have been the roof of a dugout. The Germans did quite a bit of reinforcing their tunnels and dugouts, making them quite habitable). Upon further exploration they found two holes in the wooden floor, causing them to think that perhaps they had hit upon a "crapper." Five minutes later this was revised, thinking that perhaps it was a cookhouse. By the time I left nothing had been determined yet. Suffice to say, they found something, though whether it was something significant remained to be seen.

It's entirely possible in this area that there could exist some munitions stores or even a sealed-off mass grave.

They were very kind to let me join them for the day. I was apprehensive that I might get in their way or not really be of assistance, but truth be told, the work was not all that strenuous. We took a good hour for lunch, which was provided, complete with tea and ale.

The best thing about the day was the constant running commentary which I will not attempt to recreate here as I would certainly not only fall short, but offend with some of the more "colourful" new expressions I learned. It also amused me that as we were digging, some of the guys, no longer in the prime of their lives, needed to stop every now and again to take a break. Not for water, nor to catch their breath, but to have a cigarette. Ah Europe.


Naomi passing buckets full of dirt down the chain. Below are shots of the spot where timber was found, and a shot of the muddy ravine.