There's something good about using the latest technology to locate things thousands of years old. I first figured I had to get a GPS unit after walking up and down Froggatt Edge in Derbyshire, knowing there was a stone circle only 100 yards away to the left, but could I find it - ha! Not even after walking a good mile up beyond where it was meant to be and backtracking...

Real Men and Women of course learned how to read maps properly in Scouts, the TA or similar enterprise, and can locate themselves to within three yards on an Ordnance Survey Pathfinder map in 15 seconds. If you're one of them then I salute your skill and you need no further information!

For the rest of us, who range from sometimes wondering which way up to hold the map and whether we didn't get the wrong sheet anyway, to those who are familiar with using maps but can't always pinpoint themselves in unfamiliar area, GPS comes to the rescue. An acronym for global positioning system GPS uses a network of satellites to fix your position on the Earth to within about 30m via a neat handheld unit about the size of a mobile phone. You get a representation of where you are and where you want to go on a small LCD screen, and you can see at a glance how far you have to go and in which direction.

You don't need GPS to find Stonehenge, and many sites are listed in excellent guides like Aubrey Burl's Stone Circles of Britain with directions of how to get there. Armed with those instructions you can find the vast majority of sites. In featureless terrain like moorland or some areas of Scotland, dense forests and other locations where getting your bearings is difficult, knowing that you are within 30m of a site saves a lot of graft :-) Naturally in that sort of area you aren't going to rely on GPS as your only means of navigation, since if you drop it on a rock or the batteries run down you can wind up a long way from home and no real idea of how to get back there. But as a stonefinder GPS is just great.

The GPS knows where where you want to go since you keyed in the information - either via the front panel which is usually time-consuming, or with a PC and uploading it to the device. It natively thinks in terms of latitude and longitude, though many can be adjusted to display national grid references which is what you will find on maps. National Grid references are far more user-friendly on the ground - they line up with the map, and the scale east-west and north-east is the same, whereas in the UK one degree of latitude takes you further than one degree of longitude. However, if lat, long is what your GPS wants to know, then that's what you will have to give it. GPS programs are not particularly tolerant of lots of extraneous information like the notes here - they really want the data in "just the facts ma'am" format. That's what the GPS search form is for. If you use that search on Druid, you will get a listing like

Latitude    Longitude   Site 
52.575913, -3.025700, Druid Castle  
54.082511, -2.077966, Druid's Altar 
55.707318, -5.733125, Druid's Stone 
54.155855, -3.084278, Druid's Temple 
53.252746, -3.914317, Druids Circle  
56.465767, -3.423534, Druids Seat  
57.248242, -2.699413, Druidsfield  
57.289001, -2.637135, Druidstone  
57.449445, -4.191605, Druidtemple  

which is just right for importing into a GPS program - just kill off the header Latitude etc, with a text editor like Notepad, save the rest as a text file and import this into your GPS program as a comma separated value or CSV file. It is possible that your software wants the name first, then lat and long, in which case you will have to use a spreadsheet to swap the columns round.