Somme WW1 Battlefield, July 1st-November 1916, France. Thiepval Memorial from the Albert-Bapaume Road. February 2014 The Thiepva
Somme WW1 Battlefield, July 1st-November 1916, France. Thiepval Memorial from the Albert-Bapaume Road. February 2014 The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme is a major war memorial to 72,191 missing British and South African men who died in the Battles of the Somme of the First World War between 1915 and 1918 with no known grave. It is near the village of Thiepval, Picardy in France. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the memorial was built between 1928 and 1932 and is the largest British battle memorial in the world. It was inaugurated by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) in the presence of Albert Lebrun, President of France, on 1 August 1932. The unveiling ceremony was attended by Lutyens. The memorial, which dominates the rural scene surrounding it, has 16 brick piers, faced with Portland stone. It was originally built using French bricks from Lille, but was refaced in 1973 with Accrington brick. The main arch is aligned east to west. The memorial's height is 140 feet (43 m) above the level of its podium, which to the west is itself 20 feet ( m) feet above the level of the adjoining cemetery. It has foundations 19 feet ( m) thick, required due to extensive wartime tunnelling beneath the structure. It is a complex form of memorial arch, comprising interlocking arches of four different sizes. Each side of the main arch is pierced by a smaller arch, oriented at a right angle to the main arch. Each side of each of these smaller arches is then pierced by a still smaller arch, and so on. The keystone of each smaller arch is at the level of the spring of the larger arch that it pierces; each of these levels is marked by a stone cornice. This design results in 16 piers, having 64 stone-panelled sides. Only 48 of these are inscribed, as the panels around the outside of the memorial are blank. The main arch is surmounted by a tower. In the central space of the memorial a Stone of Remembrance rests on a three-stepped platform.
Size: 4127px × 2707px
Location: Somme Battlefield area of Northern France
Photo credit: © BRIAN HARRIS / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 1916, battlefield, brian, cwgc, edwin, great, harris, july, lutyens, memorial, missing, somme, theipval, thiepval, war, world, ww1, wwi
