Thornborough Henges

The third, most northerly, henge remained in private ownership at the time of the original agreement but in February 2024 English Heritage announced that it had acquired it.

[2] It is almost a mile in extent and runs from Thornborough village, under the (later) central henge and terminates close to the River Ure in a broadly east/west alignment, 8 kilometres (5 mi) north-west of Ripon.

Typically, burial mounds and mortuary enclosures are found alongside cursus monuments, indicating that they probably had a ceremonial function.

[6] Historic England considers its landscape comparable in ceremonial importance to better known sites such as Stonehenge and surrounding Avebury, and the Orkney monuments.

[7] The three henges are almost identical in size and composition, each having a diameter of approximately 240 metres (790 ft) and two large entrances situated directly opposite each other.

Since 2004 an exception was made by then-landowner Tarmac that allowed people to attend an annual event in celebration of the Gaelic festival of Beltane.

[15] Preliminary investigations of this area of land to discern its archaeological significance suggested that it may have been a location of ritual Neolithic encampments, possibly used by those people who built or visited the henges.

A campaign led by local people and concerned archaeologists attempted to persuade Tarmac and North Yorkshire County Council to guarantee the protection of the area.

In February 2006 North Yorkshire County Council turned down Tarmac's application to expand quarrying to the Ladybridge Farm site.

Late in 2007 campaign group Friends of Thornborough requested a judicial review of the planning permission due to a number of procedural irregularities.

In November 2016, North Yorkshire County Council’s planning committee agreed with the owners Tarmac to approve further quarrying in return for preserving[clarification needed] the site of the Thornborough Henges and 90 acres of surrounding land, which would eventually be handed over to a public body.