For about fifty years, an ever expanding and increasingly ravenous sand and gravel quarry has been operating at Thornborough. From a relatively humble post war output of around 50,000 tonnes per annum, the amount of sand and gravel extracted has exploded to more than 500,000 tonnes per year. Sand and Gravel is of course a much needed resource for modern society, but at Thornborough we are paying a heavy price in terms of the loss of our cultural heritage. The amount of land consumed by the quarry expands exponentially as each year goes by. The earliest quarry at Thornborough chose the deepest gravel. Over time the depth of gravel in the remaining land has reduced, meaning that on top of the ever increasing demand for gravel the area of land quarried per tonne of gravel has dramatically increased. The current quarry has been producing 500,000 tonnes per year for the last ten years and has quarried approx 10 acres a year to provide this. The latest quarry application is to produce 550,000 tonnes per year and will quarry 25 acres per annum. This relatively recent history of quarrying has taken its toll on Thornborough, at the central henge, quarrying activities in the immediate post war period took a chunk out of its structure as shown here. The same quarry also removed almost half of the earliest monument in the complex - the Central Cursus. This cursus is a 1.2 km long "ceremonial causeway" that was created in 3,500BC and survived intact until post war quarrying took away almost fifty percent of its length, along with countless other monuments that were lost without record. It was partly due to serious loss of heritage like this that the British Government introduced its planning guideline PPG16 - which calls for all nationally important ancient sites to be left untouched by development. The loss of archaeology and setting on the west and northern sides of Thornborough has been extensive. The post war quarry began immediately to the west of the central henge and progressed northwards towards and then past the Northern Henge, eventually the quarry passed Nosterfield Village and continued to extract a large area running eastwards from the north of the Village. The majority of this quarrying was without archaeological recording. However, thanks to PPG16 this has been a mandatory requirement since 1990, even for sites where no archaeology is expected. It is because of this we now know that hundreds, probably thousands of important archaeological features have been destroyed in the earlier years of quarrying. The most recent extraction at Nosterfield Quarry to the north of the village, had it's application granted in 1994. The proposal therefore came under rules based on PPG16, and even though little or no archaeology was expected from 95% of the site, an archaeological watching brief ensured that all major archaeology discovered during the works was in the least recorded. As a result, we now have a picture of the archaeology that surrounds major ritual monuments like Thornborough - it has provided a large scale sample that we can use to help understand what the rest of the area surrounding Thornborough may have looked like. It helps us understand what we stand to lose if quarrying continues. Unfortunately, PPG16 is merely a set of guidelines and these are further watered down by their interpretation within the County Council planning rules. It is therefore a shame that PPG16's tenet that nationally important archaeology and setting, whether scheduled or not, should be preserved in situ does not appear to be enforceable within North Yorkshire. At Nosterfield Quarry, a great deal of archaeology, some of which has been described by Tarmac's archaeologists as "largest group of Neolithic features of this type so far recognised in the North of England. " has been subject to gravel extraction with a minimum of archaeological investigation. This is a primary motive behind wishing to see the quarrying stopped - no archaeology, regardless of its importance is safe if we do not know about its existence in advance - it takes time to understand the importance of a discovery, time that a quarry cannot give. Fortunately, all is not lost for Thornborough, for whilst most of the west and northern areas have been lost to quarrying, almost all of the southern and eastern sides are untouched. Thornborough may have only half of its original cursus, but it still lays claim to the best preserved henge site in the country, it is still a remarkable place. Thornborough is made even more remarkable by the knowledge that it is surrounded (quarried area excluded) by hundreds of archaeological features - each one capable of solving the puzzle of Thornborough. It is clear this will be lost if quarrying is allowed to continue within the ritual landscape of these henges.