Megaliths of the Grand Ouest France

Submitted by hewpop on Friday, 30 November 2007 Page Views: 2958

Country: France Steve Mansfield-Devine writes: For me, it’s all about the landscape. My interest in megalithic sites was rekindled by another, long-term project. Called ‘The Human Landscape’, it’s a photographic study of how we leave our marks on the world around us. In part, this project is a reaction to the immense amount of twaddle that underlies landscape photography today.

I’m tired of the highly pictorial, ‘camera club’ mentality by which landscapes must conform to arbitrary and artificial notions of purity. Any overt sign of human presence, such as a car or electricity pylon, is deemed unacceptable.

This isn’t unique to photography. On one trip to Cornwall, we stayed at a National Trust cottage on the edge of a lake. The cottage is visible from a number of public footpaths. A few hours after arriving, an NT person pitched up at the door to ask us to park our (medium blue) Ford Sierra around the back of the property, so as to not spoil the view.

And while I was happy to comply, it made me wonder what was so objectionable about the car. That it was a man-made object? So was the cottage. That it was blue? Actually, it matched the colour of the sky quite well. That it was modern? Maybe that was it. If so, how old would the car need to be to be acceptable in that scene? As old as the cottage? Where does the threshold lie? Wherever it is, I guarantee it will seem no less arbitrary.

There are few landscapes in the UK - few in Europe, probably - that do not carry the marks of mankind. Dry stone walls, power and phone lines, fences, paths and roads, tracks trodden through grass or bracken, hills and valleys denuded of trees, crops, fields, farm buildings, cairns - which of these is acceptable in landscape photographs, and why? The signs can be very subtle. Most fields, even entire hillsides or ranges, are effectively artificial because they would not look that way if farmers had not kept sheep or goats grazing on them for centuries.

Megaliths are among the most ancient of mankind’s marks on the landscape - certainly the oldest deliberate marks. This is the source of my interest in them now, as signs of people who passed this way and felt the need to create such enduring memoranda. Their message may have been forever obscured by time, but the signal remains. I’m not trying to decode it, merely acknowledge and perhaps honour it in some way - find a place for it in today’s landscape.

Read more in his excellent new blog Megaliths of the Grand Ouest, www.montcocher.com and thanks to hewpop for finding it.

Contributor Bio for hewpop: Based in Devon, contributing since 2005. Occupation: Retired`.

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