The iron age hillfort that makes people cry: David R Abram’s best photograph

‘I make a patchwork of 75 images stitched together’ … the iron age hillfort, which is all trees now. Photograph: David Abram

I took this picture of Badbury Rings in Dorset before the pandemic, when I was still figuring out how to use a drone to photograph ancient sites from above. Hillforts look amazing from the air: the ripple effect and autumn colours are extraordinary and it’s a view that the human eye usually never sees. During the iron age there would have been a lot of woodland around, but none inside this enclosure. Now, where 25 round houses once stood, the enclosure is full of trees, with very little surrounding it.

I went there at night and slept there – that’s what I always do – and when I woke at dawn, I got about 15 minutes of low-angle sunlight. I was able to capture the images I needed. The altitude restrictions of drones mean you can’t encompass the entire monument in one shot, so I have to make a composite – a patchwork of 75 shots or so that I stitch together to create a final image. This also means the composites can be printed at a really large scale. Some of the images in my current show are about one metre across – but this one could be printed the size of a billboard.

Making these pictures became a compulsion. I started driving longer and longer distances to reach prehistoric sites

It’s an unusual sort of photography as you are not seeing the image through the lens in real time, so you don’t know what’s going to happen until it’s been processed. When I first saw this, it was breathtaking. I’m always looking for abstraction because I think when the eye and the brain are struggling to interpret what they are looking at, all sorts of magic happens and something of the origins of that ancient site gets through to you. It is a lovely, unknowing and pleasurable experience to look at these pictures, and then, when you read the label and it says it’s a 6,000-year-old tomb, something else happens.

Before I started doing this, I was a guide-book author, travel writer and photographer. I grew up in Wales, living among these ancient places – my mother’s and grandparents’ ashes are scattered on a bronze age mound. I became interested in sacred geography when I did a master’s in visual anthropology. I’ve been to a Native American reservation in Montana, and lived with people who had a strong relationship with the landscape. I had been experimenting with a drone for my commercial travel work, then all these interests came together and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Making these pictures became a compulsion. I started driving longer and longer distances to reach prehistoric sites. There was a huge response to the images on social media, which gives me the confidence to carry on putting resources into the project. That attention led to the Aerial Atlas of Ancient Britain in 2022.

When I show the pictures to people, the reaction is extraordinary. People often cry during my talks and tell me the images have changed their life. But all I’ve done is facilitate a connection between something in them and the landscape, the past and the people that inhabited this land before us. I’m not talking about anyone’s genetic ancestors, I’m talking about people who lived in the very distant past on the same land that we inhabit. When I was going through a tough time, visiting these sites helped me. I would sleep on Salisbury Plain, get up at sunrise and take pictures of bronze age cemeteries near Stonehenge while on the verge of tears. Afterwards I would feel lighter, as if I had been to church. It kept restoring me.

David R Abram’s CV

Born: Cardiff, 1969.

Trained: “MA Visual Anthropology.”

Influences: “Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Smithson.”

High point: “Shooting around Stonehenge in the snow during the pandemic, when there were no people about.”

Low point: “Locking myself out of my van naked during a blizzard in the Cairngorms.”

Top tip: “Never press the snooze button – get up and do that thing, because you never know.”

• A solo exhibition of Abram’s work, Traces: Pre-Historic Britain from the Air, is at Lighthouse, Poole, from 5-30 March.