We're still standing

With their potent blend of wild looks and mystery, Britain's ancient sites have an enduring magnetism–and there are far more of them than you might imagine, says Tom Howells

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THE Isle of Wight, sometime in the early 1990s. I was coming up for six years old and had recently moved to the island's rugged south-west coast from suburban Worcestershire. Out on a family walk above the village of Brighstone-forested downland tumbling to a sandstone ridge, dotted with gorse and with dramatic views of the Channel-something loomed out of the mizzle. A gargantuan, grey-green rock of perplexing heft, rising 13ft from the soil to meet the evening sky: Mottistone Longstone. The Neolithic-era monument was, to me, an unprecedented sight; as mystically unknowable as it was tactile, sitting on the edge of a contoured strip of earth and all the more atmospheric for the isolated setting and terrible weather. As I recall, a barn owl actually floated out of the gloaming. I've been entranced ever since.

The Longstone is only one of the thousands of ancient sites that Britain has to offer. The A-listers need no introduction: Stonehenge, of course, the rubbernecking of which from the A303 is a classic English summer pastime; Avebury, the world's largest stone circle and sacred complex, subsuming an entire Wiltshire village; the inverted green cupola of Silbury Hill nearby, Europe's largest manmade mound; the Neolithic Heart of Orkney, a collection of circles, chambers and prehistoric houses of timeworn splendour and prestige. However, to varying degrees of size and impact, these features of the landscape—from lonely moorland megaliths to grand stone rings, coffin-like cist graves, dolmen tombs, subterranean fogou tunnels, earth-covered barrows, rock-pile cairns, gargantuan chalk figures and lofty hill forts—are ubiquitous. The country strains under the weight of ancient rock, if only we know where to look. Much of it, too, is rich with folklore.