Five Battlefield Locations Ideal For School Trips

For any primary or secondary school student, school trips are one of the best ways to acquire and retain knowledge in an interesting and interactive way. Even for most adults, days out with their class visiting any given location are likely to be among the fondest memories of their school days, and facts learned on the course of those outings are likely to stay in their memory far longer than those acquired in the classroom.

Bringing the past to life

And while these sorts of excursions are beneficial to pretty much every subject taught, it is impossible to argue against History being one of the areas where students can benefit the most from taking school trips. Visiting the actual location in which a major historic event took place will help pupils comprehend the circumstances and geography of that event in a way mere text in a schoolbook can never aspire to, no matter how detailed the illustrations.

Exploring the battlefields

In that regard, battlefields make for particularly good destinations to take groups of children on school trips. For better or worse, wars – in particular the two World Wars – gave the past three or four centuries some of their most defining moments. Visiting one of the sites in which major battles from these conflicts were fought might help students understand and capture the ambiance and mood of the period. Most of these battlegrounds have been turned into tourist attractions for this exact reason; World War I and World War II alike fascinate large numbers of people, and preserving these spaces gives interested parties a chance to understand the lie of the land and the conditions under which that particular battle was fought.

Teachers wishing to take their students to one of these battlefields have several options from which to choose, ranging from conflict sites from the 18th century all the way up to World War II. Some of the most famous include:

• Alamo, United States of America. While this particular site may be more relevant to American students than British ones, the Alamo is a well-known battle from early United States history. Taking place in 1836, it pitted Mexican forces against the Texan army, in a key event - the Texas Revolution. Nowadays, the nearby Alamo Village operates as a film set and tourist attraction, offering, among other things, re-enactments of the famous battle.
• Hastings, United Kingdom. More relevant to English pupils, Hastings was the setting of a 1066 conflict opposing Norman forces to King William I’s armies, in what was a pivotal event in British history. The invasion (the last successful one in the country’s history) helped shape British customs and language, which prevail to this day.
• Waterloo, Belgium. Unrelated to both the London rail station and the ABBA hit, this Belgian location was the site of a confrontation between French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and a coalition of a Prussian army and the Duke of Wellington’s forces. The French were eventually forced to surrender, ushering in a half-century of peace for Europe.
• Somme, France. The banks of the river Somme were the stage for one of the bloodiest battles of World War I. British and French armies opposed the German forces, with the offensive resulting in over a million deaths - perfectly illustrating the horrors of war.
• Passchendaele, Belgium. Yet another historic WWI battle, once again opposing the British-French coalition to the Germans. This site is very close to another historic WWI battleground, Ypres, and might make for an interesting double-bill for classes taking school trips to that region.

In short, teachers wishing to enable their students to experience battle sites first-hand have plenty of options available to them - most of which do not even entail travelling outside of Europe.

Angela Bowden works for STS (School Travel Service), the UK's largest educational travel company, providing tours for secondary schools, primary schools and colleges. School trips with STS can encompass a focus on art/design, foreign languages, history, science/nature, geography and more, to worldwide destinations.

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