Piper raises funds to mark century since The Somme

Piper Evan Finnegan of Falkirk, Scotland, is busy training and blogging before he embarks on a charitable cycling and running campaign to arrive at in France in July 2016 to make the one-hundredth anniversary of the one of the most significant conflicts in the history of piping and warfare, the Battle of the Somme.

Finnegan’s charity challenge will raise money for Poppy Scotland and his regimental association, the Kings Own Scottish Borderers. He will eventually set out from Edinburgh by bike, also running along the way as he gets to France and the battle site, where more than one-million soldiers were killed or wounded between July 1 and November 18, 1916, making it one of the most horrific battles in history.

Finnegan has already started a blog that catalogs his preparations, and he has and will highlight various soldiers who were killed, and then be at the graveside 100 years after he died. Readers can also donate on his website as he hopes to raise at least £1,000 for the cause.

Finnegan served with the Kings Own Scottish Borderers for more than eight years and has been closely involved with commemorations of the Great War, frequently returning to the battlefields in France and Belgium. He has been a member in the past of the Grade 1 Torphichen & Bathgate and the Grade 2 52nd Lowland Regiment.

While more than 16-million soldiers and civilians died as a result of the First World War, the four-year conflict produced some of the greatest pipe music ever created by some of the greatest pipers ever, including Willie Lawrie’s 9/8 march “The Battle of the Somme.”