This portrait of Harry Patch by Don McCullin is a striking image from an exhibition of the photographer's work now on at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath.

McCullin, one of Britain's greatest war photographers but today more interested in portraying the landscape around his home in Shepton Mallet, combined his old life with his new when photographing the old warrior Patch, not long before he died in Wells in July last year, the oldest man in Europe at 111 years and 38 days.

Patch was the last surviving British soldier from the First World War and one who, unlike some others among the final few, had actually fought in the trenches of France.

Perhaps because of the nightmare of Passchendaele and Ypres, the message he always put out was of the folly of war, a view that chimed in well with McCullin's battle weariness before his new lease of life in Somerset.

Mr McCullin's exhibition is previewed on pages 8 and 9 of today's West Country Life.