The early modern Historian, and expert on the English Civil Wars, the late Professor Blair Worden wrote: ‘What should they know of the present who only the present know?’ We can share Worden’s view, in that studying and engaging with History indeed opens and broadens the mind to the wealth and depth of human experience. My fascination with learning about and representing History began as a young boy; including upon returning home from holidays in Wales building Lego models of the medieval castles I had visited. Having immediate family who served in the British armed forces during the Second World War and growing up among the ‘Airfix generation’ it was probably inevitable that I would develop an enduring and wide-ranging interest in Military History. Historic landscapes, buildings, and other places – battlefields and fortifications in particular - and the stories behind the people who once occupied those spaces continually fascinate, inform, and inspire me in my teaching and research. First and foremost, I am an enthusiast for my subject. And if I had to philosophically acknowledge influences from the past, it would be from approaches by eighteenth and nineteenth-century antiquarians – who as enlightened (but largely amateur) polymaths eagerly pioneered interdisciplinary approaches to exploring, studying, explaining, and representing evidence of the past.