Image: Detail of the memorial wall at Batumi.

The inspiration for this project was the discovery of the names of young soldiers from the area in the UK I grew up in, the Black Country and Birmingham, who were buried in Batumi, Tbilisi and Baku, only commemorated in recent years by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Some years ago, in Batumi, on the Black Sea coast, I was told about an old British military cemetery at Feria graveyard in the hills above the port. It was not so easy to find as it's actually outside the cemetery walls, up an unmarked sude road.

Here are 68 names engraved on Vratza limestone quarried in Bulgaria, men who came from all over the British Isles – Bath, Poole, Canning Town, Stroud, Paisley, Dunfermline, Torquay, Hanley, Birmingham, West Bromwich – and elsewhere. Here too are those recruited to serve with the Balkan Labour Corps, such as Labourer Son Van Tin; nothing else is known of him. Among their number are several Greeks who had come as muleteers from the Macedonian Front. There’s a soldier from Nepal, and one from Rajasthan. The first to be interred at this site, in December 1918, was Private William Fell, aged 24, 7th Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment. He came from Bradford, was once a machine hand in the printing industry, his widowed mother a rag sorter at a paper mill. Among the regiments listed are the Staffords, the Worcesters, the Warwicks, all of whom recruited heavily from Black Country towns and the city of Birmingham. There’s a Private Albert Jackson listed, no relation that I know of. Two others catch my eye; Private Frank Lane from West Bromwich and Private William Cutler from Old Hill. I wonder what brought them here, and what would they have made of this place?

With the Bolshevik takeover of the country in 1921, the graves were soon neglected and forgotten. Tea bushes were planted over the site. A photograph from the 1990s shows a small tarmac road, and a building used as a Russian barracks. It was said that the mounds of three or four of the graves were still visible at that time.

The memorial wall was dedicated on Remembrance Sunday, 2014. The graves were soon neglected and forgotten. Tea bushes were planted over the site. A photograph from the 1990s shows a small tarmac road, and a building used as a Russian barracks. It was said that the mounds of three or four of the graves were still visible at that time.