Guess my recent fieldnotes to the Giant's Grave long barrow upon Milton Hill are typical of what I feel at these sites. For all their magnificent stones etc - for me, anyway - sites such as Avebury can't hold a candle to the wobbly, mis-shapened monuments erected by some single family group in the middle of nowhere when it comes to vibe. It's at places like these that you get to the real, raw bedrock of society back then..... what real people did when there was no governing elite to engage in political power play.... Don't get me wrong, I love the major sites for their profiles, their engineering brilliance - the Tursachan utterly poleaxed me when I first saw it... so much so that I snapped my tripod in half and didn't even realise it. And being lucky enough to catch it deserted late evening in a rainstorm, it remains my favourite site. But...

Many of the high moorland 'circles of Britain, where the stones barely break the surface, make it abundantly clear these were purely functional sites, the builders in awe of their surroundings and making no attempt to compete with nature. Castlerigg may be a photographer's wet dream, but I think, for example, the Burn Moor 'circles are actually the real deal instead.

To answer the 'upon arrival' bit, my first thoughts are often... 'is that it? stones aren't that high etc..' But first impressions, in my experience, are often very mis-leading.... just scratching the surface. My average visit time, I'd say, is about three hours.. sometimes longer if the vibe is really there, sometimes shorter if access is an issue. But I find it takes a while for the relationship to the landscape to become apparent, to try to understand why the monument was placed where it is. Very often the attention to detail with regards placement is astonishing, almost as if the form of the site is very much of secondary importance to where it is. Dunno, but in my view if you don't take the time to sit, look, absorb and think, you may as well be collecting stamps for all the insight you'll get. Less is most definately more.