ceremonial monuments

Above Thornborough village lies in the centre of the photograph, at the eastern end of the cursus; the road from Thornborough that passes the central henge runs south of, and parallel to, the cursus, whose western terminal lies towards the bottom edge of the photograph.

Earth and sky: the Thornborough Henge monument complex

Few archaeologists had even heard of the Thornborough henges until 2002, when a local campaigning group started to kick up a fuss about gravel- and sand-extraction in the vicinity of the monuments. Now Thornborough is routinely described as ‘the Stonehenge of the north’. As Chris Catling reports, a decade of research has transformed our understanding of one of the most important monuments of its kind in Europe.