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.

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.