"..no camera could catch the fleeting moment of harmony." I reckon most TMA'ers will understand what you mean, June. No matter how good a photographer you may be - or delude yourself to be - there is so much more to a site visit.... or even just walking or sitting in a landscape... than the visual aspect. Wind, sound, heat, cold, smells etc which no image can convey. Wild ponies coming up to check you out, cows wandering up a barrow to have a look at you, birds of prey hovvering above to determine if you are a likely meal. What makes it 'special' is that it doesn't happen everyday. Far, far from it. If it did, I suppose it wouldn't register. Guess you just have to be there to experience a fleeting moment in time, whatever that entails. What the camera can do, though, is trigger memories of all those sensations. I can read old fieldnotes and I get half the story, perhaps. Dig out the relevant image and I'm back there. Strange. Music can have the same effect. Dropping in on Combe Gibbet with the sister last Sunday, Cope's 'Citizen Cain'd' filled my head. Yeah, it had just come out when I visited last. The brain's a peculiar thing.

I guess we as a species have an inbuilt tendency to look to the past in times of uncertainty for solace... even when the past probably didn't seem that great to those that lived through it. As I recall Cope says something like 'nostalgia is a yearning for something that didn't seem so great at the time' in his paper TMA fieldnotes to Y Cerrig Duon in South Wales. There's a current revival of 80's music etc - e.g Duran, Spandau - which I thought was rubbish at the time, but in light of today actually seems rather good. What I'm trying to say, I think, is that although our ancestors may well have been in awe of the general landscape they lived in - perhaps believing it to be possessed by spirits which determined whether the corn would grow etc - they may well have not necessarily regarded it as aesthetically attractive or a great place to be specifically because it was an everyday part of their existance. All they knew, with nothing else to compare against. Perhaps that is why they chose particularly 'extreme' sites such as hill and mountain tops to deliminate them from the 'every day', and so by definition make a visit there special - not necessarily enjoyable, but memorable. Perhaps there was a pilgrimage aspect to it... the more effort a visit takes, the more it 'means'. Callanish was like this for me, certainly. A way of experiencing sensory perceptions outside the normal. I guess this is the overriding reason I climb, walk, sit and basically do what I do.... to experience sensations and emotions outside my normal remit by using my senses to their (apparent) utmost. Some people use drugs to achieve this; in a manner of speaking I use nature itself, because it's not something I engage with every day. No doubt if I was forced to live on a mountain top for ever I'd grow to hate it.

It's always struck me the way chambered tombs - particularly the great Orcadian examples - were constructed to force visitors to crawl down a passageway in pitch darkness in order to enter a chamber which may - or may not - have been filled with rotting corpses (at the very least I guess the smells would have been extreme to our tender senses). A visit would have memorable even if you didn't believe your ancestors were inside. Imagine the effect if you truly did? Mind blowing. Similarly Postman's recent visit to the main Carneddau ridge in Snowdonia set me thinking again - did people really undertake a procession to the highest cairn upon Carnedd Llewelyn? Did they choose a day when the mists were swirling for increased dramatic effect. Snow, even? Are you kidding me!! Difficult enough for us clad in Gortex and whatnot, but in furs and animal skins? Or were their clothes superior to ours, like the Inuit polar bear suits? But that they visited these cairns is not in question (those upon nearby Drosgl were excavated not too long ago with the discovery of internal cists). These monuments must therefore have have phenomomal meaning and I reckon that must have been primarily because of their locations. Pure orchestrated theatre. No wonder we were apparently considered elders at 40.

I live across the water from a Norman castle (Hadleigh) but have only been there a couple of times in my life... because it's just 'there' and always has been. Part of the everyday environment. Similarly the Bull Ring locals up in Derbyshire probably don't equate that superb henge with being 'special' because it's always been part of their everyday existance. Familiarity breeds contempt is perhaps not quite right, but certainly it doesn't heighten awareness.

But I'm rambling on!! Time to stop.