The past is soon forgotten. Even recent history is quickly reduced to facts and statistics. And when that history involves suffering and death, we seem to want to forget.

A Time Team episode I saw recently, where Baldrick and his pals excavated World War 2 anti-aircraft emplacements on Shooter’s Hill, talked about how quickly we lost, and are still losing, the artefacts of that recent conflict.

Pointe du Hoc, Normandy

The monuments of the war still litter the countryside across Europe. The stop lines and pillboxes in England, and coastal defences along the Channel and Atlantic shores of France are among those that interest me most. But the fascination comes in part from the way they seem to be slipping into a kind of obscurity. We can read about the conflict that spawned them. We know how and why they were built – even the names of some of those who built them. This is not prehistory. But for many of the people who encounter them – the tourists and beachcombers – they probably appear as bizarre and mysterious objects left by a long-lost race of people.

In many ways they are acquiring the same obscure and inscrutable mystery as neolithic monuments – the standing stones and dolmens whose true purpose and significance are lost to us. The exact purpose of some of the remains is almost secondary: they seem to have acquired a layer of indecipherable symbolism.

Gun emplacement

Last year, I was lucky enough to visit a key site for these ‘modern megaliths’ with my artist friend Doug Selway. We spent a day at Pointe du Hoc, the cliff-top German artillery emplacement a short distance west of Omaha Beach in Normandy. It was taken, with immense bravery and sacrifice, by US Rangers.

The shattered (and sometimes surprisingly intact) remains of the massive concrete structures have now assumed the air of an auspicious location. Perhaps the fact that it certainly was a sacrificial site – and parts are effectively war graves – lends it that solemn and faintly menacing aspect.

The broken blocks of concrete often directly echo the abandoned melancholy of many of the best neolithic monuments. And added to this, as World War 2 slips from living memory, is a sense of mystery – a veil slowly descending over the relics so that they assume their own importance. They are no longer simply reminders of a past time but assume a significance of their own, right now: they become phenomena in our time, places of wonder and mystique.

Pointe du Hoc by Doug Selway

Doug has recently completed a painting (above) of one of the gun emplacements at Pointe du Hoc. It brilliantly conveys that sense of mystery and the strange impression one gets that this was a place of ritual and sacrifice, and that whatever went on here is no longer fully understandable – that the true meaning was understood only by the now-lost generation that experienced it.

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