The landscape around this part of Normandy, France is full of man-made monuments – from standing stones to iron mines.

While out driving recently, Trish spotted something in the distance. It was a brick-built tower sitting in a small valley.

We crossed the field to get a closer look. This involved clambering through a barbed wire fence and hacking through undergrowth. We stood on the top of the ridge looking down into the heavily overgrown valley. In front of us, seen through the trees, was a gigantic megalith.

The brick-built tower was at least 100ft high. There was another, further across the valley. The construction showed that they were clearly Victorian. A bridge, then, but lacking any superstructure.

The structure was just outside the village of Rapilly, in the Calvados département but very close to the border with the Orne. It’s part of an area known optimistically as the Suisse Normande (Swiss Normandy). It’s hilly, full of gorges cut by rivers through the schist and granite.

As we drove towards home, we discovered another viaduct, also brick-built and clearly of a similar age, but arched. It sits, disused, towering over the hamlet of Mesnil-Villement.

Research quickly revealed their history. They supported a branch railway line built between Flers and Falaise and opened in 1874. It was fairly shorted-lived. Traffic stopped on much of the line in 1938. And the final short section was closed in 1969. The viaduct at Rapilly was dynamited.

We paid another visit, from the opposite side of the valley, a couple of weeks later. It’s not easy getting to the viaduct. There are no paths: you have to cross farmland, dodge under a couple of barbed-wire fences and fight your way through a wild wood.

We got to the base of one of the towers, now largely covered in ivy. A tiny stream wends its way past the monument. A field on the river’s flood plain is choked with bramble and nettle. It feels very wild and remote and a strange place to find such a massive structure. It was like something from a sci-fi or fantasy novel – a giant obelisk of inscrutable purpose.

The image on the right shows Trish standing at the base of the tower – she’s the tiny yellow blob. The camera is angled up sharply and the lens set to its shortest focal length, but I still had trouble getting the entire structure in the frame.

This is a site to which we intend to return, at frequent intervals. It has a truly magical and also slightly tragic atmosphere.

It’s difficult to photograph the towers through the foliage, so winter might provide better opportunities to show the structures in the landscape.

I intend to shoot picture tracing the remains of the Flers-Falaise branch line. It has left many relics in the landscape – embankments, cuttings, tunnels (of which more in the next post), station buildings and, of course, bridges.

I’ve already posted a few images in the Branch Line section of the portfolio, and will add more soon. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a postcard image of the viaduct from its heyday, when it still had the steel, box-section superstructure that carried the trains.

For me, it’s all about the landscape.

My interest in megalithic sites was rekindled by another, long-term project. Called ‘The Human Landscape’, it’s a photographic study of how we leave our marks on the world around us.

In part, this project is a reaction to the immense amount of twaddle that underlies landscape photography today. I’m tired of the highly pictorial, ‘camera club’ mentality by which landscapes must conform to arbitrary and artificial notions of purity. Any overt sign of human presence, such as a car or electricity pylon, is deemed unacceptable.

This isn’t unique to photography. On one trip to Cornwall, we stayed at a National Trust cottage on the edge of a lake. The cottage is visible from a number of public footpaths. A few hours after arriving, an NT person pitched up at the door to ask us to park our (medium blue) Ford Sierra around the back of the property, so as to not spoil the view. And while I was happy to comply, it made me wonder what was so objectionable about the car. That it was a man-made object? So was the cottage. That it was blue? Actually, it matched the colour of the sky quite well. That it was modern? Maybe that was it. If so, how old would the car need to be to be acceptable in that scene? As old as the cottage? Where does the threshold lie? Wherever it is, I guarantee it will seem no less arbitrary.

There are few landscapes in the UK – few in Europe, probably – that do not carry the marks of mankind. Dry stone walls, power and phone lines, fences, paths and roads, tracks trodden through grass or bracken, hills and valleys denuded of trees, crops, fields, farm buildings, cairns – which of these is acceptable in landscape photographs, and why? The signs can be very subtle. Most fields, even entire hillsides or ranges, are effectively artificial because they would not look that way if farmers had not kept sheep or goats grazing on them for centuries.

Do we read significance into these signs? Of course. We read significance of some kind into every part of an image. How we read these signs is the interesting part. Take the picture at the top of the page. Is it a ceremonial route to a sacred site of ancient ritual? No. It’s a public footpath that passes by a fenced-off mineshaft in Cornwall. But each of us can add whatever meaning we like. Some of us will see a path winding through some coastal woodland (also in Cornwall) as leading to something mysterious, or frightening, or enchanting, or maybe we see it just as an opportunity for a brisk stroll.

Megaliths are among the most ancient of mankind’s marks on the landscape – certainly the oldest deliberate marks. This is the source of my interest in them now, as signs of people who passed this way and felt the need to create such enduring memoranda. Their message may have been forever obscured by time, but the signal remains. I’m not trying to decode it, merely acknowledge and perhaps honour it in some way – find a place for it in today’s landscape.

Because, of course, the landscape has changed immeasurably since neolithic times, and in a way that any people find surprising. On our recent visit to the Carnac region, we found many of the megalithic sites – the standing stones, dolmens and alignments – nestled in tranquil and picturesque woodland. And that is woodland that simply did not exist when the stones were originally erected. Stone-age man denuded the landscape of much of its forests, hacking down the trees for firewood, building materials and to make way for primitive farming techniques that quickly exhausted the soil. Brittany is now far more wooded than it was 6,000 years ago.

That significantly changes the atmosphere of the megalithic sites, and changes how they relate to the landscape. And regardless of speculations about their use as astronomical devices, as portals for earth energies or whatever (and there are many hypotheses that range from fascinating but unproven down to the frankly wacky) our encounters with these monuments are affected by how this sit in today’s environment. And those encounters are what I want to explore.