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.

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.