Ever since the earliest days of photography, this question has been raised from time to time: “But is it art?” So to think on the subject, here are three versions of the same image, taken recently at the ancient Long Barrow neolithic site, near the ‘English Venice’ village of Bourton-on-the-Water, in Gloucestershire.

“Art is what you make of it” is the obvious riposte to that question, so with these images, the answer – and preference – is probably best made by the individual in all of us.

From this point the thought process can be fairly straightforward, allowing for the fact that surroundings make so much difference to how, where and why an image like this – or any other – is going to be used.

For example, the ghostly semi-abstract (top) would perhaps look best on the wall of a modern apartment, while being a little less suitable for a fireside-snug traditional environment.

Conversely the colour image – which has already had some of the brightness of its colour range reduced a little to avoid garishness – would look highly suitable hung in that traditional backdrop.

The black-and-white mono image combines old and new. Filters allow the clouds to look their best, while the simpler appearance of mono provides a calm, quiet flavour, and simply looks so good, wherever it goes.

So am I a mono man? Not to the exclusion of alternatives – like I say, we’re all individuals and every image is an individual, too!

As for the rest of this isolated Long Barrow site – the barrow is actually the hump in the middle of the trees, dug originally as a burial mound – I’ll be presenting a short photo-essay on it soon.

In the days when Anglo-Saxons ruled England, November was known as ‘Wint-monath’ or wind-month, as this was when the first serious winter storms usually started, ushering in a period reckoned to last until signs of spring the following March.

For pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons, an important November custom was lighting huge open-air fires to honour their gods and drive away evil spirits. Fuel for these would have been vast mounds of dead leaves, and piles of twigs and other dead wood not required for winter heating or cooking.

These early Anglo-Saxons were pagans, a polytheistic faith that worshipped many deities, collectively known as the ése. Chief among the gods was Woden, but Thunor (also known by the more familiar name, Thor) would have been the one to placate in winter, for he was a god of sky and thunder and supposedly humanity’s friend.

Thunor’s power symbols included the hammer and the swastika, which represented crossed thunderbolts. The latter is a power symbol indeed, and a solid fact that the Nazi Party – hugely concerned with visual statements, from logos to architecture – used it to such monumental effect.

And it still wields symbolic power. For example, it is illegal in Germany to sell any product with a swastika affixed – for example, a Messerschmitt model aircraft cannot be sold with markings that include a swastika for the tail fin.