An ancient festival is being staged this weekend at one of the North East’s most historic sites.
Thornborough Henges in North Yorkshire is a place well known amongst the Pagan community and enthusiasts for English folklore.
They began to gather at the site on Friday to celebrate the Autumn Equinox which is also known as Mabon or Harvest Home.
It is celebrated when day and night are of equal duration before the descent into increasing darkness and is the final festival of the season of harvest.
In short it means that summer is now at an end and is a modern Pagan ritual of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth and a recognition of the need to share them to secure the blessings of the Goddess and the God during the coming winter months.
While people began gathering at the site from Friday with some people camping over night, the main festival events take place on Sunday.
The opening ritual will be performed by Leodis Pagan Circle at noon and the closing ritual performed by Nidd Pagan Moot at 5pm.
Several hundred people are expected to turn up to Thornborough and it is growing in popularity since Pagan festivals were re-established there in 2004 with the Beltane festival which takes place around May 1 to celebrate the beginning of summer.
The 5,500-year-old earthworks, north of Ripon, are thought to have been built to mirror Orion’s belt for its religious focus.
The site, off the A1 close to Masham, is made up of an alignment of three - Northern, Central and Southern - circular mounds with ditches and banks within which were settlements and burial grounds.
It’s around one mile long end to end, and was chosen as it was an ideal site for settlements being close to an established road route and the river Ure.
It was constructed long before Stonehenge and is almost 1,000 years older than the pyramids of Giza.
As a spokesperson for Historic England told us: “It is in the top 10 Neolithic pre Bronze Age ceremonial sites in Britain. It is on a par with Stonehenge and the Orkneys. In fact it is known as the ‘Stonehenge of the North’.”