This month, Michael Crane of Little Gully Publishing led the Gallipoli Association’s Helles Battlefield Study Project on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The initiative focuses on documenting the material record of the 1915 battlefields.
Says Mike:
I can now boast I have definitely been in Little Gully!
Little Gully holds particular significance for our publishing project, which is named after this very location. It is where Alec Riley, a signaller with the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division, spent his last days on the peninsula, an account detailed in his Gallipoli Diary 1915, which we published in 2021.
We called this place ‘Little Gully.’ The section lived in it for some days. It was a blind alley, but there were steep paths up the sides near the head. The ledges in the cliff face were strata of harder rock than that above or below which, in places, was sufficiently far back to give us room to walk and work on the ledges, the lower one in particular. We could reach this ledge by climbing up a heap of stones. The place was really a shallow cave. Vick lived in it, and here our lines were overhauled for breaks and bared places. Several miles of wire were man-handled in this cave. We lived in shallow holes in the gully floor. Our kitchen was on the right, near the heap of stones. I lived in a small hole on the left. Ormy and Claude had adjoining holes, opposite. About 20 feet up the gully-side there was a shelf of rock ten feet wide, and we could walk round the head of the gully on it. Brigade headquarters, where Tim lived, and the signal office, were high up on the left of the gully…
After the war, Alec Riley returned to Gallipoli and described the coastline north of X Beach, noting how the cliffs are broken first by Little Gully and then by the larger Gully Ravine, which he refers to as ‘Great Gully’. It is this contrast that likely gave Little Gully its name.
Mike’s recent fieldwork directly connects the detailed historical accounts found in Riley’s diary and other contemporary accounts to the physical landscape as it exists today, underscoring the importance of on-site studies in understanding the past.
Join the Gallipoli Association to access the detailed reports of the Helles Battlefield Study Project.
