Visiting Tyne Cot Cemetery
Be moved by the world’s largest Commonwealth war memorial near Passchendaele, Belgium
If, as the war poet Rupert Brooke wrote, "there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England" it must surely be the Tyne Cot Cemetery just outside the historic village of Passchendaele.
Begun in 1917, shortly after the 3rd Australian Division captured this strategically-important area, a German defensive point on the Passchendaele-Broodseinde road, Tyne Cot is believed to take its name from a barn which stood beside a railway level crossing in the area and which reminded soldiers of the British Northumberland Fusiliers of a traditional Tyneside worker's cottage: a 'Tyne Cot'.
Today, Tyne Cot Cemetery is the largest Commonwealth war memorial and cemetery in the world and an unmissable destination for visitors on our First World War battlefield tours in Flanders, north-west Belgium.
The site of the graves of 11,956 commonwealth servicemen who lost their lives in the Battle of Passchendaele, the sheer scale of this beautifully-maintained cemetery is overwhelming, and the poignancy of the experience of visiting Tyne Cot Cemetery is further emphasised by the fact that seventy percent of the soldiers commemorated here are unknown, their headstones marked simply "Known unto God".
