The Thornborough Henges forum 71 room
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I understand. That's very sad.

Would it be true to say that if EH say definitively that an area is nationally important then that makes permission well nigh impossible, so for your fears to be realised then their statement,

"we have no hesitation in asserting that these deposits are of national importance, dating from the Neolithic period and related to the adjacent monument complex and its wider landscape"

... would need to be qualified, to make it crystal clear that they actually only meant PART of the land?

If so, their new statement would look pretty much like a retreat under pressure since if they meant part they had every opportunity to say so in their current statement.

Words are wretched things aren't they. If they'd only changed one, and said this "area" instead of these "deposits" are of national importance, dating from the Neolithic period and related to the adjacent monument complex and its wider landscape" there would be no scope for cutting the area up.

I suppose there are bits of the Stonehenge landscape that are entirely devoid of nationally important deposits yet who could conceive of excluding those from the whole and entertaining digging holes and creating lakes in them? Perhaps the parallel with Stonehenge may yet prove the best hope and Tarmac's use of "the same methodology and scoring system applied to finds at Stonehenge" may yet come back to bite them. I do hope so.

English Heritage have already confirmed 75% of the site does not have nationally important archaeology. Given that no further work have been carried out in this area and Tarmac are saying that the evaporation process for the glacial lake apparently went on hold for 3,000 years I find this assumption rather dubious.

However, the argument is at last getting to the core of the issue - as you rightly suggest - what do we regard as setting?

The settlement on Ladybridge is very likely to be the largest discovered in Britain - Larger even than the one announced at Millfield the other week. This is the archaeology that covers 25% of Ladybridge. I expect Tarmac to say they will not quarry the deposits, but will quarry the rest on the site.

How does this affect the setting? I suggest that setting for such a large structure must include a significant part of its landscape - after all, how would we apply the term setting to the Thornborough Henges themselves? I think most would agree that us ordinary people regard the setting of a henge to cover at least a 100m radius of the structure and when you get to a site such as Thornborough, several hundred meters at least.

But, how do English Heritage interpret setting? Is it hundreds of meters or nothing at all, which I think Tarmac will suggest - purely the land holding the archaeology.

Maybe we should send some letters to EH asking for clarification of this point? I think it has a big impact on a lot of sites.