[Stones] Thornborough Restoration short-list

[George Chaplin]

"exciting because we know so darned little about the
Neolithic / Bronze Age in relation to the heavens:
anything going on at Thornborough is likely to have
had some form of reciprococity elsewhere in the
British Isles, and of course, i am principally
thinking of Avebury ..."

I neglected to mention that the site that I consider to be a "sister site",
from a campaigning and general importance point of view - Tara, has also
recently claiomed an Orion connection. I've a feeling that their science is
not as far advanced as ours and I think its going to be very interesting
using some of the Thornborough data to cross - compare potential alignments
and so help raise the profile of both monuments, though I don't think Tara
needs much help in that department right now.

"i don't know the Thornborough landscape but i am
sometimes in the vicinity of the colossal Dorset
Cursus, and i'm pretty sure both ends of this progress
are marked by long-barrows, so i should suspect the
cursus idea, and the afterlife, or 'the ancestors' -
were somehow connected?"

Their used to be an exellent example of a cursus at Scorton. At one end it
was closed and behind it were a bunch of barrows. From that point, the
cursus went as straight as a runway, up a small rise and on to the
"heavens". Unfortunately that was quarried pretty much 100% and the quarry
is now owned by Tarmac.

Tarmac are up for sale you know. Fancy clubbing together and buying them
out?

;)

George


--- George Chaplin <webmaster at ancienteurope.info>
wrote:

> All this talk of restoration has kind of got me
> wanting to put my words into
> action. I'm thinking that now is the time to start
> pushing for a restoration
> of the ruined parts of Thornborough's landscape,
> starting initially with the
> cursus/landfill.
>
> If what I'm lead to believe is right, then
> Thornborough's cursus will get a
> significant mention in Yan Hardings book about the
> astronomy of
> Thornborough, due out later this year. This book
> will I believe be endorsed
> by the RAS and I think all of the calculations have
> been verified by
> Sheffield.
>
> For those of you that have not been to Thornborough,
> the western half of the
> cursus has been pretty much quarried in full and
> then partially landfilled.
> Leaving behind a cursus that is initially a 4m
> quarry ditch, then a 5m
> landfill mound and then a 4m quarry ditcvh again.
>
> The furthest western tip of the cursus was never
> quarried. The quarried bits
> have been left as pretty useless strips of land,
> with little topsoil and
> poor light conditions.
>
> I principle, what I think we should push for is to
> flatten the landfill and
> use the excess to fill the quarried areas. Mark out
> the cursus in some way
> and turn it into a piece of open parkland running
> down to the river Ure,
> with a path connecting West Tanfield to the cursus
> via a riverside walk. I
> know the area and I think that other than actually
> paying for the
> restoration, the landowners would be happy to have
> this land resored, and
> afterwards they cam continue to use it as it is now
> - as pasture for sheep.
>
> Personally, I'd also be open to adventurous ideas of
> trying to recreate the
> ancient cursus on the section that has been fully
> quarried to make it more
> interesting for visitors. I personally think that
> such a recreation can be
> done in a way that inspires solid debate on the
> subject, even in common all
> garden Joe Public, with the right interpretation
> boards it could be made
> both interesting and not too dictatorial in terms of
> the actual recreation,
> after all there are few records of what was actually
> there and that
> information is lost forever.
>
> I tend to think these days that cursuses where kind
> of symbolic spirit paths
> similar to those that appear in other cultures, and
> that the connection with
> Orion could well be astrologically based - the
> rising sign of the gods?
>
> George
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