A Son of the Rock

Hooge Crater Museum is on the Menin Road just at Bellewaarde, less than a stone’s throw from our hotel. The museum was described in a pamphlet we picked up in In Flanders Fields Museum as the best privately owned museum in Flanders. It’s housed in a former chapel and is utterly jam-packed with exhibits relating to the Great War.

In front of the former doors to the chapel lies this German grave marker:-

From the Menin Road the path to the museum entrance is lined by stone, shaped as sandbags as if it were a trench:-

Entrance and door. Again made to simulate a trench:-

Almost the first thing you encounter in the museum proper is this Fokker DR 1. A Fokker triplane in the scarlet colours as flown by Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron:-

Typical exhibits. (Tank track on left):-

British Officer mannequin with part of a tank behind:-

Trench Mortars?:-