War walk in county "battle fields"
A war walk looking at the story of the home front in Shropshire in the Great War will take in the county's "battle fields" on March 31.
Titled "The Battle of the Shropshire Fields," the three-mile easy walk led by historian Keith Pybus will be by field paths and lanes and is based on Acton Scott Historic Working Farm, near Church Stretton.
It starts at 10am and costs £5.
The walk will reveal the desperate struggles in both Germany and Britain to feed the armies and the civilian populations.
And there will be four-legged contributors in the form of Charlie and Joe - half a million horses like them were requisitioned during the conflict.
In a nation in which 60 per cent of the food was imported, Keith will tell how a ploughing-up campaign averted starvation and how Britain overcame the U-boat threat. When the young men on the farms went to war, they were replaced by tractors, by women and by German prisoners-of-war.
And at St Margaret's Church he will draw upon the researches of the Shropshire War Memorial project to tell the sad stories of two sets of brothers from Acton Scott who fell in the First World War.
