Yorkshire’s Stonehenge

Did you know that Yorkshire hosts the largest group of prehistoric earthworks in Britain – and that their setting is threatened by opencast mining?

Stretching from the standing stones at Boroughbridge in the south to the cursus already destroyed at Scorton in the north are the remains of dozens of monuments constituting a landscape that was sacred to our prehistoric ancestors.  Considered together, these monuments are an archaeological record equal in importance to the World Heritage Sites of Stonehenge, Avebury and Orkney – yet they remain virtually unknown to the wider public.

The centrepiece of this impressive array is formed by three massive henges, each 240 metres in diameter, uniquely laid out in a straight line near the village of Thornborough.  They attest to an exceptional level of planning and a mobilisation of labour on a par with the construction of the pyramids.

Opencast mining has already bulldozed the landscape immediately to the west and north-west of these spectacular monuments, taking bites out of two henges and destroying buried archaeology, including half a cursus and several pit alignments.  Fortunately, Tarmac’s application to extend their mining operations at Ladybridge Farm, the site of a Neolithic settlement, was rejected by the North Yorkshire County Council’s Planning Department in February 2006. However, the company plan to appeal.

English Heritage, supported by the CBA and the YAS, objected to the application, but is not confident that archaeological arguments alone will preserve the setting of these sacred monuments.  So the nearby villagers banded together under the banner of ‘The Friends of Thornborough’ to argue for rejection on the additional grounds of adverse impact upon the local ecology and environment. Their campaign to save the henges continues.

You can help the campaign by:

sending a donation in the form of a cheque made out to “The Friends of Thornborough” to Mr M. Sanders, The Manor House, Danby Wiske, Northallerton, DL7 0LZ

helping us in other ways by giving of your time or skills (contact Mike Sanders on 01609-777480 or at              m.sanders@freenet.co.uk)

for further details, consult their web-site at www.friendsofthornborough.org.uk

Jan Harding, the senior on-site archaeologist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Newcastle, writes:

“The Vale of Mowbray contains a remarkable concentration of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. There are no less than seven henges, at least two cursuses, and the stone settings of the Devil’s Arrows at Boroughbridge.  The most impressive of these monuments are to be found at Thornborough, located some 10 kilometres to the north-west of the cathedral town of Ripon.  This ‘sacred landscape’ is located on a gravel and sand plateau which flanks the River Ure and consists of three equally spaced henges which all share a north-west/south-east orientation.  Each henge has a diameter of some 240 metres and a double entrance through a pair of ditches and banks.  They are the largest such sites outside the Wessex chalkland and their number and structural complexity is unmatched elsewhere.  The complex also consists of an earlier cursus and ‘long mortuary enclosure’, at least two double pit alignments and a number of denuded round barrows.”

for further information see: http://thornborough.ncl.ac.uk