a Napoleonic farmhouse called hougoumont

A team of archaeologists is planning to excavate a Napoleonic farmhouse that was defended against seemingly impossible odds by the Coldstream Guards during the Battle of Waterloo, 200 years ago.

The archaeologists, led by Prof Tony Pollard of Glasgow University, will begin the most comprehensive excavation carried out so far of the farm at Hougoumont and the wider battlefield. They will be joined by Mark Evans, a former Coldstream Guards officer, who narrowly escaped death while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

He returned home in 2010 with post traumatic stress disorder.

In an effort to deal with his condition, Mr Evans is going back in time to one of his historic regiment’s most famous victories, on June 18, 1815.

The French army had been told by Napoleon to seize the Duke of Wellington’s strategic position on the , a few miles from Brussels. Hougoumont was a cluster of 12 buildings situated in woodland directly 

The battle had reached a critical moment, with 14,000 French soldiers on the brink of breaking into the chateau compound and securing victory, when Corporal James Graham, a 24-year-old guardsman, closed the large gates of the farm while under fire. “Every guardsman from day one in training is told about Waterloo and Hougoumont and what that means to be a Coldstream Guard,” Mr Evans said.

“They might not know where Waterloo is but they will know that on that day it was a Coldstream Guard who closed those gates at Hougoumont farm.”

Mr Evans said the painstaking process of excavating a historic site can be cathartic because soldiers “understand what it’s like to have been in these kinds of conflict situations”.