AS others headed for the beaches and coastal holiday resorts Herefordshire teenager Katie Westwood started digging on a battlefield in northern France - and made history.

Katie, 17, from Leominster, uncovered a hidden concrete bunker that served as a major German army command post in the bloody battle of the Somme in 1916.

Midlands historian and broadcaster Howard Tuck, who immediately went to the site with a TV film crew, praised Katie's initiative and said the discovery was a very important one.

"It is a unique find," he said. "Historians have known there was a key command post in this area but no one knew where it was - it has been lost up until now."

Katie, of Etnam Street, Leominster, a student at Hereford Sixth Form College who hopes to study history at university, was intrigued by the Somme battlefield after earlier visits.

She made a lone trip to the village of Pozieres with a yen to investigate and started by studying maps and books.

Katie had a hunch about a site near a chalk pit on a wooded ridge while out exploring the battlefield area. A 16-year-old French boy, Tony Stripperli, joined her in her quest.

They set to work with spade and pick axe and toiled for 12 days to excavate what turned out to be a heavily fortified German 'blokhaus.' It was designed to withstand massive explosions and was used by both sides at various times.

The battle, which cost more than a million Allied and German lives in the summer and autumn of 1916, raged back and forth over the same ground for months.

Shrapnel

The command bunker was along what became known as 'Dead Man's Road.' Inside, Katie and Tony found the corroded remains of a British Lee Enfield rifle, a tin helmet, shrapnel balls and a large number of HP sauce bottles.

Howard Tuck said he was not surprised at the latter find - the sauce was popular for the tinned 'bully beef' eaten by British soldiers.

Near the bunker Tony found an inscribed compass that had belonged to an officer in the 'Leeds Pals' of the West Yorkshire Regiment. Their finds were grim reminders of the human cost of the Somme carnage nearly 80 years ago.

"It's a peaceful, serene landscape now and its difficult to imagine what happened there," said Katie.

s Katie Westwood with some of the artefacts she unearthed in the German bunker that lay hidden for decades.