The world seems much emptier all of a sudden, and the stones more silent.

What a wonderful researcher, writer, thinker, and indeed, poet. I love the way he respected the megalithomaniac's intrinsic need to speculate; to imagine. To bring these stones back to life. He was intrepid in bringing ethnography into the mix, notably his observations of American Indian ritual in Prehistoric Avebury which were thought provoking and fascinating, and that wonderful bit of speculation on the moon being the house of the dead in his slender 'Prehistoric Astronomy & Ritual', and so many wonderful, provocative ideas in Stone Circles of Britain and of course, Rites of the Gods. Indeed, his imagination was all the more compelling as it was so firmly grounded in science. I love this quote from Rites of the Gods:

"Archaeologists can tell from which mountain source a stone axe came, what minerals there are in a bronze bracelet, how old a dug-out canoe is. They can work out the probable cereal-yield from the fields of a Late Bronze Age farm. These are objective matters. But the language, laws, morals, religion of dead societies are different. They belong to the minds of man. Unless they were written down, and even then only if they were recorded accurately, we shall find it hard to recapture them."

Indeed.