A giant rock rises up out of the field, a ragged, jagged colossus unmoved by the wind and driving rain. Further along the path looms another, then another, then another, all arranged in a curving line that vanishes behind a church tower and a barn. Meanwhile, on a patch of grass, two massive, lozenge-shaped stones stand tall in front of the Red Lion pub. Everywhere you look, in fact, there are eerie, unexplained slabs – jutting into what ought to be just another charming Wiltshire village.
The three stone circles of Avebury are a masterpiece of land art. That term is more often used to describe 20th-century works, the sort that reside in craters or sit by lakes in the American west. Yet when you look at, say, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the curling pier made of rocks and earth he built in Utah's Great Salt Lake in 1970, it is clearly inspired by the henges of prehistoric Britain. Avebury is one of the most haunting of these monuments. Although it was created 5,000 to 4,500 years ago, by people who left no writing of any kind to explain their intentions, it seems likely the stones and ditches that pepper Avebury had a religious purpose: they were meant to commemorate ancestors, to commune with the dead. As you walk around these immense, twisted stones, faces and agonised figures seem to rise to the surface.
Inside Kettle’s Yard gallery in Cambridge. Photograph: Paul Allitt
Modern artists in far-flung places have taken inspiration from Britain's prehistoric wonders for a good reason: Avebury's stone circles have shaped this landscape with a sublime and mysterious power that has endured down the ages. But what makes them art? And what makes them British? These are questions I'll be asking myself over the coming months, in a new series for guardian.co.uk: every day, I'll try to tell the story of British art, one image, object or structure at a time. And I've started by visiting Avebury, York Minster and Kettle's Yard gallery in Cambridge – all homes to great British art, from the prehistoric, medieval and modern periods.
What connects these places? Is there a common theme? British art really just means art made on these isles, but the moment you scratch at its "Britishness" you find multiculturalism is nothing new. From Avebury, I travelled north (and forwards a few thousand years) to York Minster, where some of the best-preserved stained glass in Britain creates a spectacle of colour that changes as daylight waxes and wanes. As I wandered through the hushed interior, sunlight struck one window, sending a stream of deep reds and blues across the stonework. It was a moment of pure ethereal beauty, a medieval light show that has lost none of its power.
York Minster's Five Sisters window
One tall window looked as if its images had melted away, damaged perhaps in one of the fires that have ravaged York Minster. But on closer inspection, the blue-grey glass of the towering Five Sisters Window is patterned in an elaborately geometric manner; it seems almost computer-generated. Surely these designs were influenced by the Islamic tiles British knights off on crusades in the east would have seen? This 13th-century window rejects figurative fuss in favour of pure mathematics and subtle, suggestive shades of colour. What, in theory, could be more British than York Minster? And yet the influence of Islam glows in its most impressive window.
The truth is that, for most of its history, British art was not self-consciously British at all. Islamic influences aside, the medieval art on these isles is deeply shaped by France, Europe's cultural leader in the middle ages. Before heading for Cambridge, I took a detour into the 18th century to explore the emergence of a more patriotic style. At Chatsworth House in Derbyshire hangs Thomas Gainsborough's Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, her beauty caught in a rapidly painted swirl of hair and silks. This was once the most expensivepainting in the world, financier JP Morgan having paid $150,000 for it in 1901.
This is what many people mean by truly British art: a tremendous Gainsborough portrait of a posh person. It reflects the fact that, in the 18th century, some artists began to define themselves as British in style and attitude. The first to aggressively promote himself this way was William Hogarth, who mocks the scrawny French in his 1748 painting O the Roast Beef of Old England. In the art of Gainsborough, and even more so in the work of Constable and Turner in the Regency period, you can practically smell the countryside, hear the rain, taste the ale.
Critics have traditionally seen such paintings as the essence of British art. But, while I love these artists, their work is just one strand among many that have shaped our history. You only have to walk out of Chatsworth House into its gardens to see that. With its roaring cascade, its colossal rock garden and vistas sculpted by Capability Brown, this landscape is one vast art installation, as astonishing, in its way, as Avebury. Landscape gardens are the British aristocracy's great gift to the world of art, and self-consciously international in their influences. At Chatsworth, I sheltered from the rain in a temple created by a French designer in the early 1700s. I looked out on to a landscape peopled by statues of Greek gods. Not so Little Britain.
I don't think our country has some overarching national genius, some artistic gene passed down the cultural bloodline; but I do believe there is one thing uniquely British about the art that is made here. The simple geography of its creation has consequences: art has responded to, and has helped make, our landscape. A passion for the land of Britain, its jutting rocks and its soaring oaks, is what connects Avebury and Gainsborough.
My last stop ushered me back to modern times. Kettle's Yard was a ramshackle, falling-down cottage when the 20th-century art collector Jim Ede first came across it in the 1950s. He transformed it into a magical place that contains both a vision of art and a vision of Britain. As I picked my way around the gallery, the wan East Anglian light cast a silver-grey hue that suited the simply furnished rooms housing gently placed works by such modernists as Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Smoothly chiselled organic forms in white and black stone invite the mind to slow down and make connections.
This house near the river Cam is so infused with a love of the land, it seems to have sprung from the very landscape. Ede saw modern British art as a natural extension of its ancient rocks. His house is full of pebbles he collected, like some stone-age aesthete, for their beauty; images of Britain's stone age circles recur in the paintings on the walls. In one tangled dream picture, Vexilla Regis by the Welsh poet and artist David Jones, mystical enchantresses float through a wooded landscape that evokes the legends of King Arthur and the Mabinogion. Way off in the distance of this 1948 work, Jones has drawn a stone circle, a symbol of all the mystery and possibility that waits, silent, in the British landscape.
It takes me straight back to Avebury. As rainwater pooled in the crevices of its ancient stones, I contemplated the green landscape rolling away under the steel sky. This is where we live, I thought – and, down the ages, artists have shown us how to look past the rain and see its beauty.
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