I have never been able to approach the mystery that Brandt put into his photograph. He often waited for hours for a squall of sleet or rain, not simply to add visual drama, but to reveal how those places actually felt. My forays to the earthwork never managed to repeat that... possibly because the area is now a Country Park and attracts families with children, picnics, dogs and kites... plus the ever intrusive sight and motorised sounds of "off-roaders."

On reflection though, thank goodness nothing is ever the same otherwise we would not be out there seeking our own enjoyment nor making our own images. In my mind the scene has no doubt changed somewhat, but in reality it's probably quite similar to how it was four-and-a-half-thousand-years ago when the first travellers of those times walked on the same route through the same ramparts on their journeys across southern England.

My more successful photographic locations along the Great Ridgeway have been around and just beyond the Avebury Stone Circle a few miles to the south of Barbary. Perhaps I felt more at ease there... I passed through the area early every morning returning from my partner's home to my own, and always stopped at least to pause for thought, breath the air, listen to unseen skylarks high overhead, read the light and take some photographs from a new view-point perhaps.

One such angle was far from new... it's one of my most repeated shots of the area. Having passed this stone many hundreds of times (no exaggeration) I must have photographed it in at least one hundred images, compositions, scenes, whatever. The clumps of trees on the horizon which so typify the openness of Wiltshire and the shelter afforded by them to modern Ridgeway foot travellers would not have been there when the first tribes of people used this route... safety in those days meant being in the open - clumps of trees held hidden dangers.

From a distance the clumps look quite neat and petite... but approach one and you'll be surprised at their size... not a handful of beech trees per clump but perhaps a hundred or more! However, it's always from a distance I've found them to be most photogenic... as in the above image.

In the 1980s I'd been doing quite a lot of freelance work for Ilford in the UK and they had purchased non-exclusive reproduction rights to a number of my images for use on product packs, in brchures and at international exhibitions. At one meeting the Ilford publicity managers made a really bad photocopy of this image and looked through the paper against the light to view the reversed, feint image. It still looked OK so they reckoned it would hold up in reproduction on product boxes... and I still see the image on packets of Ilford Multigrade paper on dealers shelves here in France a quarter of a century later!