"we're not lost, private, we're in normandy"

and this illustrated map, courtesy of the royal army service corps (as found from the aldbourne heritage center) and which, if our sources are correct, may have been drawn by pat christenson:

to the site where easy company set up their barracks back in 1943. our navigational abilities have, to our surprise, proven reliable. aldbourne is a very small village so the site wasn't far from the square, but it was a mildly frustrating walk interspersed with rain and beset by slippery gravel slopes BUT hi-ho silver bitches 😌

this is where the enlisted men and ncos lived in huts made of wood and brick and cinder blocks, constructed as part of a temporary encampment. these were described as "wood and quonset-type buildings with a potbelly stove in each and toilets outside" by don malarkey and tbh nobody loved them because the outdoor toilets apparently made everything smell like shit. the site was difficult to find at first and we used the shape of nearby roads and other infrastructure to roughly estimate its position but we found it and discovered that it is presently a football field.

unfortunately the rain picked up almost immediately when we got there and we did not bring adequate footwear, so we could not actually go onto the field and manually identify where each individual hut and building used to stand, as we originally planned to do. so we walked around the perimeter. only a handful of buildings from the encampment remain as most of them were removed by the village council after the war. one of the remaining buildings is the cookhouse. the other is a red cross hut, nicknamed the "nissen hut" by archaeologists and historians, which looked like this:

and which we did not have access to. at any rate i'm pretty sure it has been repurposed as a workshop.

we had lunch at the aldbourne post office and café,

aka downstairs from the room where dick winters and harry welsh were billeted!

here's dick's upstairs window overlooking part of the village square.

all of this is also on private property and the owners, who are also the proprietors of the café. according to the owners, various members of the band of brothers cast often make trips up here and i believe we missed peter youngblood hills (shifty powers) and nicholas aaron (popeye wynn) by a month or two.

then we decided that it was time for a pint. our first stop was the crown where unfortunately we did not take any photos, but it was the go-to pub for enlisted men. a short walk away is the blue boar aka the officers' club.

our last stop before we left had us going up to st. michael's church at the other end of the village green to pay our respects to the veterans buried there. we sat at the bench at the hilltop overlooking the village from across the cemetery. apparently this was dick winters's favourite spot to visit if he wanted some peace and quiet, and he wrote about it in his memoirs:

we were also invited to participate in the annual aldbourne excavation project by breaking ground heritage where archaeologists come by the former barracks site (aforementioned present-day football field) and dig for material culture. as the excavation took place in may and clashed with jules's thesis and my final exams, we were sadly unable to attend, but we did leave our contact details for next year's dig.

the aldbourne scenes in the hbo miniseries, by the way, weren't actually filmed in aldbourne. they were filmed in hambleden, buckinghamshire, which we might visit next year on our way back to london.

unlike the easy men, unfortunately we did not go on to invade fortress europa after leaving wiltshire. here we are:

:)