Free Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery by Christopher Knight, Alan Butler Page A

role to play, but such a suggestion is, in our estimation, just as absurd as the concept of a meeting place. As we have already noted, the ditches at Thornborough were ‘inside’ the banks. Only a fool would build a castle in which the moat existed inside the castle walls. Even if this were not the case, defending such large structures with the manpower that was available to any community in the late Stone Age would have been impossible.
    Maybe, some experts have asserted, the henges were places where domestic animals could be corralled and kept safe from wild animals and would-be rustlers at night? Once again such a suggestion cannot apply to Thornborough, mostly on the grounds of the physical dimensions of the henges. Nobody would go to all the effort expended at Thornborough to protect a few sheep or cattle when a much smaller enclosure would have served the purpose far better. It is highly likely that animals were allowed into the henges – if only to keep the vegetation within them short, but this was clearly not their primary function.
    What we are left with is the understandable fallback position of something that simply cannot be explained in terms of a practical use – namely a place of religion and ritual.
    In this suggestion we may be approaching something like the truth. The three henges are connected, and probably always were, by a wide ‘avenue’. Such avenues are known to have existed elsewhere, for example at Stonehenge, and are thought to have been used at certain times of the year as processional routes from one part of a sacred landscape to another. Britain is also covered with long, usually straight, earthworks from early prehistory, known as ‘cursuses’.
    If the giant henges at Thornborough and elsewhere seem to have proportions that are far larger than would be necessary for any human purpose, perhaps that is because they were never meant to be ‘human sized’ but rather ‘god sized’. It is also possible that they were so large on the landscape that it was thought by their creators that they were certain to be ‘seen’ by the gods, who were undoubtedly looking down on humanity from above. This theory is supported by the fact that the banks around the henges at Thornborough were once covered with a mineral called gypsum. This would have shone out brightly in sunlight or moonlight, though from the ground it would hardly have been discernible – especially as there is no high ground in the locality from which to view it. This massive undertaking in ‘lighting up’ the henges can surely only have been for the sake of the gods?
    Of all the suggestions put forward by archaeologists to try and explain the existence and purpose of the Thornborough henges, only the ritual one makes any sense, though even this seemed to us to fall short of a total explanation for so much work.
    So we asked ourselves, what were these henges for?
    Given that they were planned using the Megalithic Yard and Rod, which are derived from timing the stars, it strongly suggested that astronomy must be of central importance. As we have said, the distance between the centres of the two outer henges is a curiously accurate 1,500 m, which we thought must be a coincidence. However, we were convinced that these structures were built for astronomical purposes, using astronomical techniques. So we wondered whether there was an astronomical factor in the layout – in terms of latitude and longitude.
    The intelligence of the Neolithic people was no different than that of human beings today. Curious and thoughtful people could not help but notice how the heavens look different as one moves about from one geographical location to another. Any careful observer will quickly realize that the stars behave differently even over relatively small distances. As a person moves north or south, the point at which stars rise above the horizon changes. The further north one travels on the surface of Earth, the higher a given star will rise into