5 RIFLES Help Restore Iconic Fovant Badges On The Wiltshire Hills

For 100 years the Fovant badges have been an icon in the Wiltshire hills but after decades of tough weather, some of the emblems needed a bit of attention and the Bulford-based 5th Battalion the Rifles were more than happy to help.

Perhaps more used to rifles, the men of D Company spent the day getting to know the Fovant Down armed with shovels and pickaxes.

Six Fovant Badges were originally cut into the hillside by servicemen stationed in the area during the First World War.  

Leslie Brantingham from the Fovant Badge Society said:

"These are badges that were started in 1916 and they were cut by the soldiers who were in the camps at Fovant and Sutton Mandeville, there were 20,000 soldiers here under training to go off to the Western Front."

One of the badges on the hillside is that of The YMCA.

But sadly the badge has faded in recent years and required some hard graft digging the outline and filling it with chalk to restore it. This is where Corporal Adam Booth stepped in and helped arrange the work: 

"So initially we just planned to come down and do a day’s work on just some of the badges just to help out the society but then we were speaking to Lesley and other members of the society and the explained that the YMCA badge was missing it was the only last piece of the puzzle to complete the rest of the monuments so we developed a plan and then decided we would come down and resurrect the old badge."

Now all the badges have been restored to their former glory for all the pass by to see.