It's a long story. High Thornhope was the original farmhouse - then it was just called Thornhope, as the entire farm was, and always has been. Low Thornhope was the new farmhouse, and is still shown as that on the OS map. High Thornhope has been abandoned and is now ruined and the postal address for L. T. just became Thornhope. There was a surveyor in the mid-1980's (I met him) looking for Bastle houses in the parish who stumbled upon some embanked ditches in the field by Thornhope farmhouse. Copying from the map he listed these, on the SMR, as being at Low Thornhope. (These excavations are perhaps the remnants of a Roman Marching Camp from ad 76, but never mind that). When the county archaeologists came to look at the stone rows and found a poor example of cup and ring art they (or he) must have looked at what was already listed there and just used the same name - and so the error was continued. I've written to them, quite clearly, but might as well have sent a smoke signal.

I did say that they'd decried my stone rows as medieval field boundaries but that's not quite true - they've described the larger two of the rows as field boundaries - there's a tiny one which shows both the winter solstice sunrise and the summer solstice sunset, which they accepted, and there's another two little ones I've made out since their visit that they've not inspected. Until they move forward on the stone circle and long mortuary enclosure at Kirkhaugh then I'm not showing them anything else. The farmers are so clannish and anti-visitor that they'll just receive garbled and misleading accounts of anything from them. I call it 'spinning them around'. It doesn't help that the huge long cairn at Black Hill was crushed for stone and they did nothing to prevent it happening - only going on a site visit after it was gone - and that the road that was constructed from the crushed stone was built without planning permission (in a SSSI).

The good news is that I get on well with Dr M.