As usual, they're only telling half the story. There were miles of trenches dug on the Eastern approaches to Edinburgh and Dundee, Cromarty Firth etc, as well as around every coastal artillery battery. in Scotland. "The full extent of the networks of trenches and defensive fortifications built in England during the first world war has been revealed in the first major survey of its kind. Detailing how resources were concentrated along England’s eastern and southern coasts – where the main thrust by an invading German army was expected to come – the study draws on existing periodicals and local history as well as LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data gleaned from the use of lasers by the Environment Agency to plot the bumps and dips of British topography. “We are all very aware of the defence of Britain in the second world war, but people don’t tend to think that the same threat was there during the first world war,” said Martin Brown, an archaeologist who led the research for government body Historic England. “Every now and again you will find zigzags and deeps and hollows running across fields, for example,” added Brown, who is principal archaeologist at WYG, an environmental planning consultancy. “There are parts of the country where you find them by falling down them, because they may be buried under some scrub, and you would not make much of them if you didn’t realise what they were. “In places like Kent and elsewhere, they have been erased not just physically from the terrain but also, in a way, from the memory.” Miles of forgotten first world war trenches unearthed in England