National Memorial Arboretum

The main entrance

 Saturday April 17th 2010

Situated just outside Lichfield and just at the start of the National Forest boundary lies the countries National Memorial Arboretum. It is a very uplifting and sad place all in one and should be on everyones list to do when visiting the region without a shadow of a doubt. To describe the place is quite hard....imagine a huge parkland with lots of trees and flowers and dotted around are some small, some medium and some large memorials to all kinds of different military and civil forces from across the country and over the last few decades.

In the car park in the entrance is a moving memorial to the 64 UK citizens that lost their lives on 9/11 and includes fragments from the twin towers themselves. Anyone old enough to remember that day (can it really be nearly 9 years ago?) will find the memorial thought provoking. There is a cache based here that sends you around some of the more interesting sites in the arboretum, though the final cache location is outside in a nearby park. Another area that we found interesting was the National Association of Memorial Masons, it has replica grave stones from across the centuries and shows the differences through time.

1 section of the main armed forces memorial

The centre piece of the whole arboretum is the large marble armed forces memorial. It has two large circle walls with the names of all miltary forces killed in action since 1945. To try and give you the idea of the amount of people that have lost their lives for Britain. Each section of the wall has 3 large slabs of marble...each slab can contain a maximum of 22 people. The wall that you can see in the photo on the left is full of names. There are still huge sections of the wall empty left for people still engaged in combat and for those battles and wars that are yet to be fought. It is a very profound and saddening place to see. It begins to put some kind of reality to war itself.

"Shot at Dawn" Memorial

 One of the most upsetting places we visited in the park was down "shot at dawn" lane. The photo shows stakes in the ground. Each stake represents one soldier that was shot by their own government for cowardice during World War 1. Each stake carries the name of the soldier it represents. Soldiers as young as 17 were among the dead. It is quite something to walk around the "stakes" and read all the names and ages and regiments they all came from. We are sure that there is a story in the several hundred soldiers that the stakes portray that we may never know. As there are so many memorials it would be hard to see them all and hard to read about them all.

 There is far too much to mention in a short blog such as this but some of the things we came across of note....memorials to the police including a police dog. An interesting section on the Galipoli campaign from 1915....plus a sad woodland dedicated to stillborn babies. These are some of the things we found interesting...but we hope that someone is inspired after reading this to go and find their own things of interest. The arboretum is a large place and we spent about 4 to 4.5 hours there and we certainly didn't see it all...towards the end of the arboretum it leads out to a National Forest trail of which we came across a genuine World War 2 pill box.

World War 2 Pill Box

In 1940 it seemed as if Hitler would invade Britain anytime and a series of pillboxes were set up all over England to monitor the threat of an invasion. For more information please click here. It was strange we had never seen one of these before and yet within an hour we had seen 3. A very educational place and one that needs to be seen firsthand.