Spanbroekmolenkrater

The blast came fifteen to thirty seconds behind schedule, and the delay proved costly: fearing the mine was a dud, men of the Royal Irish Rifles had already climbed out of their trenches when the ground finally erupted beneath them, and several were killed by their own mine's blast and falling debris. Some of them are buried across the road at Lone Tree Cemetery. Most of the craters left by that morning's mines were later filled in or lost to farmland; this one, the largest, is among the few still intact. Piecing together the site took Lord Wakefield years of negotiation with six separate landowners, and in 1933 he sold it on for a symbolic one franc to the Talbot House Association, the Poperinge-based soldiers' welfare charity that still owns it today.