{"id":17572,"date":"2012-11-01T14:06:45","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T18:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17572"},"modified":"2017-02-13T11:07:15","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T16:07:15","slug":"recreational-trench-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/01\/recreational-trench-building\/","title":{"rendered":"Recreational trench-building"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve dug trenches, in my long-past militia days, but I&#8217;ve never really thought about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-2226235\/Historian-Andrew-Robertshaw-builds-60ft-long-First-World-War-TRENCH-Surrey-garden-highlight-plight-frontline-Tommies.html\" target=\"_blank\">doing it as a hobby<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Surrounded by barbed wire, sandbags and mud, this 60ft trench is barely distinguishable from those occupied by British soldiers fighting in the First World War almost a century ago.<\/p>\n<p>The enormous dugout has been painstakingly recreated by an ex-history teacher in his back garden in Surrey, and the dedicated 55-year-old even spent 24 hours living in its confines with a team of volunteers as part of his efforts to experience life as a WWI soldier.<\/p>\n<p>Andrew Robertshaw and 30 helpers spent a month shifting around 200 tonnes of earth to build the enormous three-room trench, which he hopes will teach people more about the horrific living conditions endured by British troops during the Great War.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The only thing that struck me about this and other photos in the article is that the re-enactors look <em>too clean<\/em>. Digging a trench, then spending more than a short stretch of time therein leaves dirt <em>everywhere<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/WW1-trench-re-enactment.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"WW1 trench re-enactment\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-17573\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/WW1-trench-re-enactment.jpg 800w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/WW1-trench-re-enactment-150x99.jpg 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/WW1-trench-re-enactment-480x319.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve dug trenches, in my long-past militia days, but I&#8217;ve never really thought about doing it as a hobby: Surrounded by barbed wire, sandbags and mud, this 60ft trench is barely distinguishable from those occupied by British soldiers fighting in the First World War almost a century ago. The enormous dugout has been painstakingly recreated [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,5,246],"tags":[31,1095,874],"class_list":["post-17572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-military","category-ww1","tag-army","tag-fortification","tag-re-enacting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4zq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18564,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17572\/revisions\/18564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}