HIGH on a hill, the lone piper is silhouetted against a thin autumn sun, the haunting notes of his lament carried on a biting northerly wind far away across the rolling fields of Picardy.

A huddled group of visitors stands in quiet reflection. Each one of us is thinking of relatives who also once passed this way, a grandfather or great-uncle, perhaps. But that was more than a lifetime ago and in very different circumstances.

From this ridge we can see the valley of the Ancre. This stream, little more than a brook, is a tributary of a far larger river that goes by a name that has flowed into our collective consciousness and cast a shadow across nearly a century. It is The Somme.

The notes fade away to be followed by a roll call. They are impossibly old-fashioned names, too. Walter, Ernest, Arthur... Hilary. Or, to be precise, Private H Charles 12338, 12th Bn East Surrey Regiment, who died in a war that has now almost vanished from living memory.

We don't know exactly how a Worcester lad ended up in a southern county regiment, but the circumstances provide the clues. By 1916, halfway through the First World War, the battlefields of northern France and Flanders had become a man-eating machine that was consuming lives at an ever-increasing rate.

Hilary, the son of John and Elizabeth Charles of Worcester, probably joined the colours sometime during that year, either as a volunteer of one of the new conscripts. After basic training, he was sent to a regiment that needed replacements.

The Battle of the Somme had ground to a halt that autumn, and the Allied generals were pondering their next move.

They decided that the next "big push" should move north to Ypres, where a small village called Passchendaele would ultimately become a byword for human suffering.

Pte Charles took part in this offensive and was killed, aged 34, on September 22, 1917. For 88 years, he lay in the Flanders clay. But one day, this Worcestershire soldier's grandson decided to visit the last resting place of a grandpa he'd never known. And thanks to the efforts of the War Research Society and the Worcester News, a dream was made reality.

Peter Parker of Kempsey, had wanted to visit his ancestor's last resting place for some time. So, when he decided to travel with the Birmingham-based organisation, I offered to discover the exact location of the grave. This was a relatively simple procedure via the internet.

Once we had the name, we could discover the identity of the cemetery. It was then a matter of informing the research society, which is a unique organisation that provides graveside visits for relatives.

So the die had been cast and the 74-year-old retired bricklayer was soon on his way across the Channel.

Pte Charles' widow, Kate, eventually married a man called Bullock, and the couple went to live in Kempsey, opposite the village parish hall.

A chapter was about to close, only to be reopened decades later.

The service comes to a close. A group of French schoolchildren moves silently past. Some stare in amazement at the man with the skirt holding a rather strange musical instrument, as we make our way down the gravel path.

I ask Peter for his thoughts. "This was so amazingly moving," he says. " To think I would be standing here all these years after my grandfather died is quite incredible. I'm so glad I've made this journey."

We rejoin the coach. The wind is still whipping in from the north, funnelling in along the valleys and hollows of The Somme, then riding the crests of fields that were once swept so efficiently by German machine guns.

It is deceptively beautiful, rolling countryside, reminiscent of any number of English shires, yet its secrets are only half hidden. For the endless rows of Portland stone in the British cemeteries, arranged like soldiers on parade, stand in mute testimony to the past.

We cross the Ancre and continue our pilgrimage to The Somme. To the north lies Ypres -and the corner of a foreign field that will not only be forever England, but Kempsey, too.

Tomorrow:

I died in Hell - they called it Passchendaele.