First World War Training Trench Found in Ireland

SPIKE ISLAND, IRELAND—The Irish Examiner reports that archaeologists led by Barra O’Donnabhain of University College Cork have found a trench used by the British military to train World War I–era soldiers on Spike Island, home of a nineteenth-century prison, in Cork Harbor. The prison, built in 1847 during the Great Famine and closed in 1883, was once the world’s largest. Two corroded grenades were recovered from the bottom of the chest-deep military trench, which had been carved through the convict cemetery. Soldiers who trained on Spike Island were sent into battle on the Western Front and Gallipoli. The British eventually handed the island over to the Irish state in 1938. To read in-depth about excavations of the Gallipoli battlefield, go to “Letter from Turkey: Anzac's Next Chapter.”