From Bazentin-le-Petit Cemetery return to the village.  Turn left and at the junction take the D20 right towards Contalmaison.  After about 500m take the track left to Flatiron Copse Cemetery.  Mametz Wood stands to the east across the field.

When Mametz village was captured on 1 July, the large wood about 2km to the northeast was only lightly held.  A great opportunity to seize it with relative ease was missed.  The first serious attempt to take Mametz Wood by the 38th (Welsh) Division on 7 July failed.  On 10 July they renewed their assault and, after two days of bitter fighting, took the wood.

A memorial to the 38th Division, commemorating their losses of nearly 4,000, now stands a little further down the track from Flatiron Copse Cemetery.  It was in the tangled remains of Mametz Wood, shortly after it was captured, that Robert Graves came across the corpse that inspired his poem A Dead Boche.

When the line moved forward over Bazentin Ridge on 14 July, an advanced dressing station was established at Flatiron Copse, which stands to the east of the track.  It was at a dressing station near Mametz Wood that Robert Graves was left for dead when he was badly wounded on 20 July.

Burials began in Flatiron Copse Cemetery shortly after the dressing station opened and continued into 1917.  After the 1918 Armistice, more graves were brought in from the battlefield and 1,568 men are now buried here.  One of the graves moved after the war was Robert Smylie’s.  Together with four other officers of the 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers who were buried where they fell on 14 July, he is now commemorated by a special memorial immediately to the left of the gate.