Mike Walker’s trip to the bucolic countryside of rural Belgium, to retrace the steps of his grandfather who fought in World War I, proves to be a haunting yet rewarding experience.

Early summer and the Belgian countryside is lush green, with livestock cluttered into pockets of shade in its soft, undulating fields. I am on my way to Ieper (Ypres) with my colleague Simon, where we will retrace the movements of my grandfather, Irishman Captain Maurice C Walker, and the 154 Battery Siege which pounded the farmland around Ieper between May 1917 and April 1918.

Simon is equipped with a CD Rom of World War I trench maps, and I have my grandfather’s field diary, photo album and the book he wrote about his time there.

Leaving Ieper train station, our first stop is Hill 60, named in reference to its height. The hill was made from the spoil deposited during the building of the railway in the 1860s.

On this May morning, it is an innocuous lump with a British bunker perched on top, its small slit facing menacingly south-eastwards, but with the view obscured by a trampoline, a neat bungalow and a row of trees. Despite the hill’s height, as the surrounding countryside was removed of trees and buildings, it afforded a commanding view of Ieper and its environs.

On June 7, 1917, the Allied forces exploded two mines under Hill 60 and the adjacent Caterpillar Hill, in order to seize this strategic vantage point from the Germans.

Nearby, bearing World War II bullet holes, is a memorial to the Australian sappers (engineers) who had dug the tunnels and laid the mines.

We head up the Ypres Salient to Hill 62 - every metre counted - and Sanctuary Wood. At one stage, the front ran over the hill; now it hosts a monument to the Canadian soldiers who died defending it, a small wood and a museum. Nothing sophisticated, the museum consists of a room with nicely laid out war material, photographs and some paintings.

Next door, as if defeated by the sheer quantity of material uncovered, the owners have erected a lean-to cluttered with tons of steal and iron weapons. Outside they have preserved a relief trench complete with access tunnels.

Sanctuary wood and the surrounding land was one of the areas my grandfather’s battery had targeted in 1918.We set off to find Manor Farm, where they had been positioned in early 1918. Parking at the railway line, my grandfather’s aerial photographs show the farm to have been just on our right, where a new row of houses now stands. We walk down the edge of a field toward the lake and there it is – Manor Farm.

Not quite the same Manor Farm recorded in a black and white photograph that had hung in my grandmother’s house in Dublin’s Leeson Park, but nevertheless . . . The farmer’s wife is a bit taken aback by the two men who appear at her door, one of them (me) clutching a 90-year-old photo album.

She suggests we come back at a time when her husband would be home. So we head for Fitzclarence Farm, which had been used as a OP (observation post) by the 154 Battery Siege while at Manor Farm.

M y grandfather described the building of the OP thus: ‘‘As it was under direct observation of the Huns, work on it could only be carried on at night. Every evening, about 1700 hours, a party of gunners under an officer made their way there.

‘‘The distance from the battery was about four miles. This walk up the line at night along slippery duckboards [the wooden boarding used to avoid the mud] with a sea of mud on either side was a very unpleasant business.

‘‘At frequent intervals along the tracks were large notices with the words ‘Dangerous - don’t loiter’ in block capitals. It may easily be guessed that very few did loiter on these paths, and that a brisk run had its attractions. The amount of labour involved in building Fitzclarence Farm was colossal, as all the concrete and sand had to be carried by hand along these tracks. It was finally completed after about four weeks’ work.”

Standing at the site of the OP and the farm, the only visible remains are a reddish tinge in the soil left by the pulverised bricks and mortar. Within short range of the field corner, the steeple of Gheluvelt church and the tower of a mill poke up from behind a shield of trees. These had been ‘shoots’ (targets) for the battery and the subject of frequent ‘‘destructive, harassing and neutralising fire’’. We take the opportunity to indulge in our first ‘iron harvesting’ of the day.

Iron harvesting involves walking slowly through open fields looking for stuff: bullets, shot, shell casings, exploded shells etc. It is estimated that, along the western front, from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border, over a tonne of ordnance fell for every square metre covered. Because of the quagmire-like conditions and production flaws, up to a third of this material did not explode.

Driving around Ieper, it is common to see live shells left at the edge of fields. Farmers carefully leave the ordnance for the weekly, milk bottle-like collection by the Belgian army. For the last decade, they have been collecting an average of three tonnes a week and disposing of it in a specialist facility; gas shells are treated separately.

Twenty minutes of harvesting throw up a couple of bullets and a detonator. We skip over the countless lumps of shrapnel (iron shell fragments designed to cause maximum injury), gently leaving a suspicious cylindrical object at the edge of the field. Later, while driving cross-country, we stop at a random field sandwiched between two cemeteries.

Within 20 metres of the road we find pieces of glass, leather, shrapnel, shot, a brass shell casing and an exploded shell.

We head to Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world. Numerous cemeteries erected to intern the soldiers who died fighting in the adjacent fields lie throughout the Ieper countryside.

Down idyllic country roads, you come across unassuming plots containing a few hundred graves, another 500 metres away there is another, and then another - and these are only the Allied dead. Tyne Cot contains the graves of 12,000 men, with the names of a further 35,000 missing written on large panels at the back of the cemetery.

All died in a 100-day period in order to secure a low-lying ridge and eight kilometres.

We manage one last cemetery visit before returning to Manor Farm - the German cemetery at Vladslo, north of Ieper. An English school group are there already, five volunteers standing in front of their classmates being challenged to put on a gas mask in under five seconds. Five, four, three, two, one . . . two of them are too slow and - unlike their peers of 90 years ago, who would either have been gruesomely mutilated or killed by the ensuing gas - they are merely laughed at.

The Allied cemeteries are unsettling in their frequency and extent, but are caringly maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Vladso, on the other hand, is industrial in the economy of space and ornamentation. The story goes that the Belgians were less willing to give the Germans space for cemeteries, so they had to squeeze as many graves into one space as possible. In this two-acre site, there are 25,644 soldiers buried.

Denied the use of white stone by the Paris Peace Treaty of 1919, the multiple names for each grave are inscribed on black stone laid flat on the ground underneath the commanding cover of oak trees.

At the back of the cemetery stands the K-the Kollwitz sculpture, named The Mourning Parents. The sculptress carved the two characters in her and her husband’s likenesses. The father stares, arms clasped tightly around his sides, towards the ninth stone in front of him, on which the name of their son, Peter, is inscribed.

Back at Manor Farm, the present resident, Marc, seemed a little reticent to welcome us, awkwardly bundling us into one of the farm outhouses. The outhouse turns out to be his own private museum, unexploded 12-inch shells marking the four corners of the room.

He unlocks two cabinets to reveal carefully preserved items: rubber from British Army waders (the manufacturers mark still clearly visible), a German rifle, a complete machinegun magazine, a Schweppes bottle, tins, a leather pouch and even a glass morphine file he found floating in a puddle. Marc takes his scavenging seriously: he has bought himself a digger.

His eyes light up when I show him my grandfather’s photo album and book. Despite having lived in Manor Farm for ten years, he has never seen a picture of any of the men who had been stationed there.

Nor had he guessed they had used heavy artillery (15’’ Howitzers, firing 500 rounds or up to 27 tonnes an hour). He is gobsmacked by the picture of the farm which had hung on my grandmother’s wall - it shows a pile of rubble concealing nine subterranean dugouts. It’s a dream come true to a man who owns a digger.

When I ask why the owners had not rebuilt the farm on the original site, Marc explains that this was common. Most buildings in and around Ieper had attracted a lot of fire during the war. Back at the Ieper Best Western, as we enjoy our predictably good Belgian dinner of steak, frites and beer, we savour the thought of Marc digging out the nine dugouts by moonlight.

Next day, we head for two other farms that my grandfather had occupied in 1917. First stop Moat Farm. Neatly lying on a sheet of plastic at the edge of a field where it meets the drive and the road is an unexploded 80lbs hell. It has been carefully dragged across the field on the plastic and is awaiting collection.

Moat Farm, like Manor Farm, has been rebuilt west of the original site. Other than the shell lying by the roadside, there is little evidence that this had been the site of some of my grandfather’s fiercest firing.

However, the view of Kemmel Hill, Hill 60 and Wytschaete Village are clearly the reason why the Battery Siege had positioned here: ‘‘We worked from morning till night, and were often unable to get any sleep at all owing togas,’’ my grandfather wrote.

A curious feature of the countryside is that, despite four years of shelling which tore up all its features, the roads on present-day maps match those of 1914-1918. Navigating the May 1917map,we twist our way to Dead Dog Farm, where the Battery Siege had enjoyed ‘‘a monotonous but more or less peaceful existence’’, but in which ‘‘the battery dog, Punch, lost his life’’.

This was where my grandfather and the Battery Siege were positioned exactly 91 years before, in May 1917. As we approach the bend in the road where we estimate the farm had been, the fields are pockmarked with small ponds, complete with reeds and the occasional duck.

As with the other farms, Dead Dog Farm has been rebuilt about 100 metres from its original site, a plastic tunnel greenhouse built where the farm had stood, with a particularly large pond just beside it showing the effects of ‘‘enemy activity’’.

All along the front, the warring sides used mines to punch holes in enemy lines. The mines that were detonated during the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele killed 10,000 German soldiers, and one of them was reportedly heard in Dublin.

We visited two craters, both now large ponds, 50 metres in diameter. One has been integrated as a feature into a newly-built farmhouse, a small jetty with punt sticking out into the lily rimmed water. Two camouflaged helmets have been nailed to the gateposts of a neighbouring house.

The Hooge Crater Museum is an orderly display of the arms and tools of the warring forces that battled in the surrounding fields. Carefully restored and presented uniforms and items give a glimpse of trench life. In the reception there is a plastic bucket of polished brass detonators for €30 each.

Back in Ieper, the town looks immaculate, with beautiful Flemish architecture and tight, tidy streets. Almost completely levelled in the war, bar the ghostly cloth hall tower, it was painstakingly rebuilt in the 1920s. The townsfolk are friendly and used to the constant flow of English-speaking visitors.

As the train leaves the station and gathers speed, the raised embankment gives a good view out over the surrounding fields dotted with cemeteries. We pass Manor Farm (the digger in place), before slowing to a crawl as we approach Hill 60. The train crawls through the cutting, the signs of ongoing work on both sides of the track.

They are carefully reinforcing the permanent way through Hill 60, as there are still a number of tunnels under the railway and suspected unexploded mines.

It is beautiful and lush farmland, a far cry from what my grandfather witnessed nine decades ago. Retracing his movements as he crisscrossed the land has been a haunting experience.

Getting there

Getting there: Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus.com) and Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) fly daily to Brussels; Ieper is 90 mins from Brussels by train.

Where to stay: Best Western Flanders Lodge, A. Dehemlaan 19 Ieper, B-8900 Belgium; from €46 per night; car rental is available.

Currency: euro.

Time difference: one hour.

Useful websites: Sanctuary Wood Museum Hill 62, http://en.wikipe dia.org/wiki/Sanctuary-Wood- Museum-Hill-62; Tyne Cot Cemetery, www.passchendaele.be; Ieper Tourism www.ieper.be; The Hooge Crater Museum, www.hoogecrater.com.