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Thornborough Henges are rapidly becoming one of Britain's most famous monuments.

Despite being almost certainly Britain’s largest ritual space from Neolithic times, this vast and hugely important ancient site has been all but forgotten until very recent times.

The centrepiece is a vast triple henge monument constructed 5,000 years ago. Under this is an even earlier cursus, and the surrounding wide area is studded with buried archaeology and further monuments.

What is a henge?

The size of the monument and effort involved in constructing the henges cannot be over-emphasised. They would have been Britain’s largest ritual site, dwarfing Stonehenge and other well-known sites. But because they are not so well known, destruction already inflicted on the surroundings has hardly been noticed nationally.

Quarrying has taken place here for more than 50 years. North Yorkshire County Council has created a household waste dump on top of the cursus. Nearly half of the surrounding ritual setting has now been destroyed, together with perhaps thousands of unrecorded archaeological features.

English Heritage declared the complex as the “Most important ancient site between Stonehenge and the Orkneys”, but despite this, it is not listed as a World Heritage Site, which means that the surrounding landscape has no legal protection from developers, other than standard planning regulations.

And right now, Tarmac Northern Ltd is systematically destroying what remains of the ‘ritual’ landscape piece by piece - for gravel.  This has already caused a great deal of the landscape surrounding Thornborough to be lost, including, no doubt, some extremely important archaeology.

To give a comparison of levels of protection, the Stonehenge World Heritage site is more than six square miles, yet Stonehenge itself is a 40m stone circle. This is because, just like Thornborough Henges, Stonehenge is surrounded by other ancient remains, for example the settlement of those that built Stonehenge which was recently discovered – 2km from Stonehenge itself.

It is becoming very obvious to archaeologists that sacred sites in ancient times also had a sacred landscape and the people who visited kept their camps outside of that area.

Unfortunately this knowledge has come too late for much of Thornborough’s landscape. It takes the authorities a lot of time to re-align priorities and unfortunately North Yorkshire County Council seem to be amongst the slowest to react – Tarmac Northern Ltd have just been given permission to quarry a large proportion of Ladybridge Farm – the latest target for quarrying.

It will not be the last – both Tarmac and Hanson have put forward plans to make an additional four tracts of the ritual landscape of Thornborough as preferred areas for quarrying. If North Yorkshire’s Council place these areas on the preferred list, quarrying at Thornborough will become a permanent and very large-scale feature: the largest gravel quarry site in Britain.

We think it is safe to say that we, the public, did our bit to try and stop quarrying at Thornborough - 10,000 signatures on the petition, 500 letters of objection and numerous public meetings and talks made this decision a difficult one for the council - but of course the planning system is prejudiced in favour of the developer. A second proposal meant the council ruled the petition and the objections were no longer valid. It took us three years to collect 10,000 signatures asking for no quarrying within a mile of the monuments and a week before the meeting it was ruled inadmissible!

TimeWatch has now received the petition back from NYCC and it is their intention to present it, along with another petition with a further 10,000 names to the House of Commons

It is clear, however, from the reaction of our politicians, that they no longer seem 'concerned' about the issue, so we do not hold much hope for this.

The future for Thornborough, as openly promoted by Tarmac, is that the henges are to be left as an island, virtually surrounded by huge open cast quarries filled with water, and a dramatically reduced surrounding landscape. The result would be a grotesque parody of the original – stripped of meaning and context, a permanent testament to the commercial greed and hypocrisy of our generation.

Britain's largest prehistoric ceremonial complex, a jewel of world heritage, is being progressively wrecked and left flooded, robbed and used as a landfill site.

What will our children think?