Cemetery Photograph - Sanctuary Wood Cemetery - Ypres by Weston Westmoreland

Sanctuary Wood Cemetery - Ypres is a photograph by Weston Westmoreland which was uploaded on September 20th, 2016.

Sanctuary Wood Cemetery - Ypres

Sanctuary Wood Cemetery- Ypres.... more

by Weston Westmoreland

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Title

Sanctuary Wood Cemetery - Ypres

Artist

Weston Westmoreland

Medium

Photograph

Description

Sanctuary Wood Cemetery- Ypres.

Hill 62, also known as Sanctuary Wood, earned its name in October 1914 when it was used during the First Battle of Ypres as a 'sanctuary' to tend to their casualties and for stragglers to wait and rejoin their units. At that time the wood was to the west of and behind the British fighting line. It is believed to have been given its name on the 1914-1918 British Army battlefield maps, called Trench Maps, for that very reason; it was providing a place of sanctuary to the wounded.

This was to be short-lived and its name deemed most inappropriate from November 1914 onwards.

In 1918 the German Army pushed the Allied Armies back towards Ypres again and the two front lines were located to the west of Sanctuary Wood close to Ypres. This meant that the Sanctuary Wood area was now east of and behind the German front line. The movement of front lines backwards and forwards over the same ground is typical of the WWI fighting during the four years of war in the Ypres Salient. This accounts for the absolute destruction of parts of the landscape over and over, and the reason why the bodies of so many thousands of soldiers from all sides have never been found.

After the war the wood was turned into a private museum by the land's owners, the trench lines and dugouts were enclosed, and the shattered trees fenced in. Today Sanctuary Wood is considered by many to offer the finest preserved trenches on the Western Front. The area was known as Hill 62 because the area was literally 62 meters above sea-level.

Not 100 metres from the trenches you can find the Sanctuary Wood Cemetery. There were three British cemeteries in Sanctuary Wood dating from 1915 onwards; however all three were severely damaged during the battle of Mount Sorrel. Two were never subsequently found, but the remnants of the third were located, and the current cemetery was based on the earlier one, and this was begun in June 1916, and used throughout the War thereafter. Between 1927 and 1932 many more graves were concentrated here from at least 18 other cemeteries and locations, as far as Nieuport on the Belgium coast.

Although most of the graves are laid out in regular semi-circlular rows, towards the top of the cemetery by the Cross of Sacrifice are irregular rows and also single graves scattered about, and these are the original graves forming Plot 1. Most of the graves (60%) remain unidentified.

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Weston Westmoreland.