2017 Battlefield Tour Page 09

The hugely impressive Tyne Cot Cemetery near Zonnebeke is the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world. It contains 11,965 burials, of which 8,360 are unidentified.

The Menin Gate proved to be too small to bear all the names of the missing so an arbitrary cut off date of 15 Aug 1917 was chosen. The names of 34,946 of those who went missing after this date were engraved on the Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot.

The popular story is that Tyne Cot or Cottage was the name given by the Northumberland Fusiliers to a barn near the level crossing on the road from Passchendaele to Broodseinde. It reminded them of a miners cottage back home in Northumberland. Around it was a number of concrete blockhouses, which were part of the German defensive line, the ‘Flandern Stellung’ along the Passchendaele ridge.

There are three blockhouses preserved within the cemetery, two are surrounded by poplar trees to the right and left of the cemetery entrance. At the request of King George V the largest, which was used as a dressing station after it’s capture on 4 October 1917 by the 3rd Australian Div, had the Cross of Sacrifice built around it.