For various reasons (not unconnected with the early days of aerial photography), the story of Neolithic and Bronze Age England is biased towards sites in Wessex, while the area around Stonehenge and Avebury is seen as the supreme example of a landscape written with ritual, religious, and funerary monuments. Perhaps that is why the archaeological establishment was slow to respond when campaigners in North Yorkshire established the Friends of Thornborough in 2002 to protest against plans by Tarmac Ltd to expand sand- and gravel-quarrying activities in the area.
The three massive Thornborough henges were never themselves under threat, being protected by their status as scheduled monuments, but the Friends argued that the henges were just the most visible components of a much wider monumental landscape, which most definitely was under threat of being turned into a series of flooded gravel quarries. Tarmac’s consultants at the time challenged this view, and said that there was little or no evidence of nationally important archaeological remains within the vicinity of the henges. It turns out that they were partly right; but it also turns out that this absence is archaeologically significant, and that it is a very important part of the story of the site.
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Once the archaeological establishment was reluctantly dragged into the fray, it was quickly established that the real problem was ignorance: too little was known about the archaeology of this area for anyone to be able to stand up in a planning inquiry and speak out with authority in favour of its preservation. English Heritage therefore used some funding from the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (set up to support community heritage projects in areas affected by the extraction of aggregates) to enable Archaeological Services WYAS to carry out a survey of a 100km² area that formed the setting of the henges.
