Thousands of people in Gwent faced war memorials and remembered those lost in Britain’s wars at the weekend.

But there are hundreds of places around the world where smaller ceremonies take place.

British soldiers, sailors and aircrew fought and died across the globe and so many now go overseas to pay their tribute. The Royal British Legion organises visits to British war graves abroad, giving family, friends and comrades alike the chance to see where loved ones fell.

These visits, as can be expected, are profoundly moving.

Often, elderly relatives will have only one chance to visit the faraway resting place of their loved ones.

My partner went with her grandparents to a British cemetery in Gradara, central Italy to visit the grave of her grandfather’s brother.

Neither had been able to visit in the 58 years since he was killed as the British advanced towards Ravenna on the Adriatic Sea during the Second World War.

A standard-bearer from the Legion and a serving British army officer accompanied the party and made sure the needs of this frail group were always met.

I too visited the cemetery some years later and was touched by the experience. We arrived in the late afternoon and the sun was beginning to set over the hilly countryside.

The graves, regimental crests etched in white portland stone, stood in terraces and glowed in the late September sun.

Wherever I go, I often seek out these sites, not out of morbidity, but to see their stories and pay some silent tribute. Some are vast, like the famous cemetery at the Menin Gate in Belgium. Others are small with 40 or 50 graves.

It was one like this I visited in a French village called Pornic some years ago.

With around 150 graves, it lies close to the port of St Nazaire, from where thousands of British troops were evacuated in 1940.

The gravestone of one man caught my breath. A sergeant in the Royal Engineers, he was 40. My grandfather was the same age and rank as this man when he was evacuated from here in the desperate days of June 1940.

He had narrowly missed boarding a ship, the Lancastria, which was sunk with the loss of almost all hands. This could have so easily have been him.

These tranquil corners of foreign fields have the power to move us still, and are scattered across Europe, North Africa, the Far East – wherever the British have fought and fell.