I remember standing with my hands resting on the ridiculous bit of yellow nylon rope that separated me from the towering monoliths of Stonehenge and thinking how easy it would be to just take a step, cross that so-weak barrier, and lay my hand flat on a sarsen or a piece of bluestone harried unwillingly from a Preseli mountainside. Around us the Salisbury Plain rolled away to the horizon, offering faint glimpses of other barrow-mounds and the great earthen avenue that leads up to Stonehenge, standing its ground a mere hundred feet from the highway. Subtract the concrete and the smell of hot tar hovering in the spring air, and you could have populated this stretch of green moor with the white dots of grazing sheep and the huts of the Beaker Folk five thousand years ago. In the shimmering dusk, with the sun sinking in a golden pool of fire between two of the center trilithons, it was easier to believe in Merlin than in pulleys.

A few days later I stood atop Arthur's Seat at midnight after hacking my way through some particularly carnivorous brambles and gazed at twinkling Edinburgh spread beneath me like a tapestry. Night-lit, the castle rose on its shoulder of rock from the center, dominating the city and drawing the eye to its ancient lines, and my Cameron blood sang. History suffused the soil onto which I eventually sank, enthralled by nothing more than the glow of the royal city, the smell of heather, and the squeak of bats as they dipped and swooped in the dark.

I remember treading carefully inside the cool dusk of Westminster Abbey, craning my head to admire the soaring cathedral ceiling and just as quickly lowering my eyes to my feet, lest I should unwittingly walk disrespectfully upon someone's grave. It is a difficult proposition, in that building, to move far without doing so, but I did my best. Some stones were worn so smooth that the names of those whose remains they marked could no longer be read. On others, the engraved letters were still clear as day, etched deep in the stone and sparking a remembrance not lightly cast away.

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