'In search for new sites nowadays I'll often look to the highest hills first and the horizon/skylines and many times I've been blown away by finding sites either on top of those hills, or around the base'
you read my thoughts.
this is certainly one of the strategies inside the psychology of ancient man.
As you say, the straight line to a site couldn't be more miserable; once in there, you realise you have come all the way to see a bunch of stone rubble supposed to be full of vibes - but the thing is, when this does not happen, you realise it's because modern man is almost completely disconnected from REALITY (i.e.the land). You leave your modern home miles away, travel by modern means and grab your camera off the PVC rucksack. One can minimise this alienation to a certain extent so as to get as much as possible into the ancient mind but never get rid of it altogether; after all, a stone site as it stands today is a ruin of something more grand and more sublime, only reconstruction or the imagination takes you back to the time when, say, a stone dolmen, used to be invisible and all you could see was, possibly, the stones glowing in the dark interior seen from a narrow entrance/hole through a long passage. But one cannot deny the impressive power of the skeleton of a site, as a kind of ancient powerful beacon in the middle of a modern countryside.
I often have an area in mind but get completely absorbed by the sites in between and very often never even manage to get to where I intended in the first place.
I am also obsessed by what seem to be natural gods in the landscape that created a point of worship for the neolithics. Many stones even mirror them.
And there's usually always ONE of them around. The only exception being the huge monumental passage graves of the south, which acted round the late neolithic / early bronze as artificial 'natural' centres or hills in themselves, and very often standing somewhat arrogantly alone on huge plains.
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