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.

Our new calendars – Signals in Stone and Dust & Shadow – are out now.

Each calendar features 12 images taken from my portfolio. Signals in Stone focuses on the megalithic monuments of France’s Grand Ouest region (in this case, mainly Brittany and Normandy), including several photographs taken at Carnac.

Dust & Shadow is about more recent monuments that mankind has left in the landscape. This first publication concentrates on German coastal defences in France, left over from World War 2. The images explore how these sites are starting to acquire a mysterious and enigmatic quality similar to that of ancient monuments.

The calendars are printed and delivered via the online service RedBubble. They are large format (A3) and printed on heavyweight art paper. This means the images are large, making them ideal for cutting out and framing once the year is over.

These images, and many others from both projects, are also available from RedBubble as framed, card-mounted or laminated fine-art prints, with the same high-quality printing used for the calendars. And you can also buy them as greetings cards. Visit the WebVivant Gallery on RedBubble to view the images.

The calendars are the first publications from our new web-based publishing venture, WebVivant Press. We’re planning a whole range of books and calendars for 2010. These will include novels and non-fiction books available in both print and e-book versions, and high-quality photography books. There will be a series of Human Landscape titles based around the photographs in the portfolio and others not available online.

If you would like to be alerted when these books appear, visit the WebVivant Press website and use the form on the home page to sign up for email alerts.

If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that the portfolio has shrunk somewhat. That’s because I’m in the process of reworking many of the images.

La Tables aux Diables, Passais, Orne, Normandy

Until now, I was happy to upload the photographs I’d taken of megalithic sites in Normandy, the Pays de la Loire and, most importantly, Brittany. I’m grateful for the number of people who’ve emailed me to say that they enjoyed my pictures of Carnac and other places.

But while the images were fine as records of the places I’d visited, they didn’t really express what I felt about the places. I always knew that the final images would be heavily treated. So now I’m going through that process (as with the image of the dolmen, above) and will be uploading the pictures as and when they’re ready.

The first to be finished are my ‘Modern Megalith‘ images of World War 2 coastal defences, including those at Pointe du Hoc – appropriate, perhaps, given the time of year.

At the same time, I’m uploading many of the images to RedBubble, where you can buy high-quality greetings cards, prints and posters. There’s already a full selection of the Modern Megaliths images and I’ll be adding pictures of the ancient megaliths – in the Signals in Stone section – as they’re ready.

I’m also planning a series of calendars and books. So please do keep popping back.

This is a landscape photography project about my response to megalithic sites and what they mean – not in the archaeological or wider cultural sense, but what they mean to me. With their original significance forever obscured, this kind of personal response is the most appropriate – the question is, how to do it.

The images I have posted so far – in this blog and in the portfolio, won’t always look like that. Some of them are pretty enough, some of them function quite well as record shots. But that isn’t the purpose of this project.

I am slowly working towards the right approach, towards the right expression of how I feel and what I think about these human marks on the landscape.

As part of that process, it helps to look at the work of other artists. As always, I find myself inspired by the painting, drawing and printmaking of Doug Selway – a fine artist and, I’m proud to say, a very good friend.

The painting above is one panel from a multi-panel panorama, part of a body of work Doug has produced about Orford Ness. This is a strange and intriguing part of the country. A bar of land just off the Suffolk coast, Orford Ness is now a major nature reserve. However, it was once the site of dark and inscrutable activity.

The Ministry of Defence (as now is) used it for many years, exploiting its remoteness to carry out work it would rather others didn’t see – and also work that would be safely distant from the general population should anything go horribly wrong. To this day, there are strange concrete buildings, their heavy roofs held up by pillars designed to blow out, allowing the roof to slam down and seal the building. The reason? They were developing triggers for nuclear weapons.

Other work, like the development of certain types of radar, has also left its enduring mark. Over time, the purpose of these sites has become increasingly hard to fathom purely from what remains. Of course, they were created in recent times, in an age of history: unlike megalithic sites, documentation and even living memories exist to explain their function. Taken at a purely personal level, however, and dealing only with one’s intuitive response to the sites (either personally, by being there, or by benefiting from Doug’s interpretation), they become fascinating enigmas on to which we can project our own emotions or fantasies – much like we do with megalithic sites.

Looking at this panel again, it struck me that the concrete structure sits in the landscape much like a circle of standing stones, with a similarly obscure significance. It is a deliberate presence within the landscape whose purpose is not readily apparent (it’s the base of a radar array, apparently, but you’d have to do research – or ask Doug – to know that).

It’s not uncommon with stone circles to find a single stone standing alone some distance outside the circle. These are sometimes given names like the ‘King Stone’ (eg, the Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor, Derbyshire). In this image, the lighthouse stands like a king stone and it is impossible not to make a meaningful connection between it and the circle.

In Doug’s painting of a grain tower (right), connections are suggested through the framing. A chief attraction of panoramic images is that they mimic, and exaggerate, our visual system’s preference for landscape-format images (a genetic adaptation, I believe, because it helps us scan the landscape around us for food and threats). Using a vertical panoramic format tightly constrains our tendency to scan horizontally and creates tension by forcing us into an unusual and unnatural vertical scanning mode. Knowing that your attention has been directed in this way, you cannot avoid concluding that there is a significant association between the tower at the top of the image and the objects beneath it.

Just as interesting, from my point of view, is that it is hard, or even impossible, to take in and comprehend the entire image at once. You have to build it by scanning down the image (and then up again, as though checking the links your mind has just made). That process means that you discover the various parts of the image in a sequential, even narrative way.

That has real potential for what I want to do with these megalithic sites, because there are many that you cannot grasp at once.

Standing stones that you approach via a woodland path (such as Carnac’s Géant du Manio), dolmens hidden by trees or a rise in the ground until you are almost upon them, alignments of menhirs – these are all sites where you go through a process of discovery that does not happen in a single instant. Typically, you find yourself stopping to take in the scene, scanning and building up an understanding of what stands before you. This is often the most wondrous moment of all (after half an hour at the site, there is a danger that the mystery evaporates and all you are left with is a bunch of stones).

Creating that sense of discovery won’t be easy. I’m not even sure it’s possible. But the attempt should be fun.

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.

I’ve lost count of how many times I looked at the sign and thought, “I must take a look one day”. Then the sign disappeared.

It wasn’t much of a sign, to be sure. Crudely painted, it gave the impression the menhir was the kind of tourist attraction you might find on Craggy Island or some down-at-heel English seaside town – the kind where you pay £5 to guess the weight of a sheep. I suspected I might find the menhir to be a pile of rubble or just a slightly overlarge boulder. And yet, the sign called to me every time we went shopping at Super U in Gorron. It was, after all, right next to the small industrial estate that holds the supermarket and a scattering of light industry.

We’d been told that the path to the menhir was strewn with rubbish – an unpleasant walk. And until recently, that was probably true. But the reason the sign has disappeared is that the whole area has been cleaned up. There are the beginnings of a new car park next to the main Ambrieres road. From there, you walk across a a picnic area and into a patch of woodland. The industrial area next door is largely invisible, though clearly audible during work hours.

The path curves around as it leads into increasingly picturesque countryside. You might be tempted, as I was, to continue following it, down a lane bordered by old and dense bocage hedging, full of mature trees. In fact, to find the menhir, you have to turn off, through a gap in the bocage (currently with no signposting) and take a narrow track that leads along a row of trees on the other side of which is a small stream.

The menhir is soon visible. It stands in the field on the opposite side of the stream, but someone has thoughtfully provided a small wooden footbridge. The field is used for cattle, so there’s a single-strand electric fence – and you need to pick your path carefully.

The standing stone is huge – perhaps 3m high. It stands hard by the stream. And although it’s still quite close to that industrial estate, and right on the edge of the town, the setting is tranquil and timeless.

The lighting was imperfect on this first visit. We turned up at 16:30 on a October afternoon. The stone was in shade from the surrounding trees and the sun was lighting a patch of the field beyond rather too brightly. I need to revisit earlier in the day. But I will: this site is only eight minutes from home. I’ve got a feeling it will become a regular haunt.

Back at the car park, I noticed that the house across the road, perched on a rise in the terrain and maybe 300m from the stone, is called ‘La Roche’ (the rock). Presumably, the name is much older than the house and might stand some investigation. At the roadside, there’s a calvary – a Christian cross. These are a common sight in France, and while the Christian church is known to have usurped many pagan sites, one shouldn’t read too much into the presence of the cross. Local councils often erect them as a way of using up the year’s budget, and this one appears to date from 2006!

Standing stones and circles have always exercised a strange attraction for me. Back in the mists of time – no, not that far back, but when I was at art school, we visited a number of sites in Derbyshire, including the famous Arbor Low. I was hooked – by the monumental strangeness of the megaliths themselves, their harmonious relationship with the landscape and the general spookiness of what one imagined took place at these sites.

I read, and was thoroughly convinced by, View Over Atlantis – sold on its message that ancient man possessed knowledge, insights and powers that we have since lost.

I’ve grown up a lot since then. I tried to re-read the book and found it embarrassingly new age, intellectually flaky and entirely unconvincing. But the stones still exert some kind of power over me, something I’d been ignoring.

We now live in rural Normandy. There are menhirs and dolmens everywhere. Our friends, just down the road, have a standing stone in their field. There’s another a few hundred metres from the supermarket where we do our weekly shop. So this is my new personal project – to document and explore the stones and their relationship to the landscape.