This year, 90 years since the start of the First World War, we took a party of Scouts from West Lancashire to take part in the official Remembrance Day Parade to the Menin Gate in Ypres (colloquially known as "Wipers" by the British soldiers!). Ypres is a small town that lies in Belgium, some 50 miles SE of Dunkirk and the Menin "Gate" marked the start of one of the main roads out of Ypres towards the front line. Tens of thousands of men must have passed through it and onwards along the infamous Menin Road, so many of them never to return.

There was a particularly corny joke in vogue in 1917 - "Tell the last man in the line to close the Menin Gate." However, there was no actual gate, nor even an arch. Instead, there was simply a gap in the ramparts which almost encircle Ypres, and a bridge across the moat. There had been a gate once, as part of the original fortifications, but this had been demolished long before the war, to widen the road into the town.

Now however, the Menin Gate stands as a tribute to those who gave their lives, and it was this monument that we started our tour of the area this year.

As a key part of our trip, we found many members of our families on the battlefields of the Somme and the Ypres region. The act of paying respect to your own relatives really does bring the battle home - and it is something we are intending repeating in future years. The Menin Gate, holding 54,896 names of those that were never found in the Ypres region, still only has a fraction of the names engraved on memorials in the region, and that's before you start looking at the gravestones. Have a look on the Commenwealth War Grave's commisson website at www.cwgc.org - see if you can find any of your relatives out there ; speak to your relatives, find out if any of your family fought out there.