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.

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.