Northorpe Henge

Some random thoughts...

Though there’s nothing at all to see on the ground here, the scheduling as an ancient monument may hopefully protect the site from the encroaching caravan sites to the Northeast, and the new housing on the edge of Hornsea to the South.

The Neolithic and Bronze Age landscape here was very different to how it is today. Back then it was more like the fens; marshy, with shallow freshwater lakes or “meres”, of which Hornsea Mere is the last remaining example. There was at least one more mere at Hornsea – during the 1970s the peat bed of it was briefly revealed after some lively tides. I remember going to the beach with my Dad and walking on the smooth, springy bed, and taking home a piece of wood which had been preserved in it for thousands of years.

Hornsea is also less than five miles from the vast Bronze Age mound at Skipsea Brough, which when repurposed as a castle motte in early medieval times stood separated from its bailey at the centre of Skipsea Mere, and sometimes still is after heavy rain. Another prehistoric lake bed can be seen as a layer of peat and wooden fragments in the low cliffs on Skipsea Beach (the best access from Mr Moo’s Ice Cream!)

I’d guess one attraction of the marshy fens of North Holderness to our Neolithic ancestors would be the abundance of fish in the meres, a useful and immediate source of food. Maybe the henge was connected with this – a site for ceremony before setting out, or for celebrating the catch? Is it too much to see the site as an outpost of the Gypsy Race culture? Skipsea lies a couple of miles to the South of the Southern edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, so it’s feasible that some of the folk living there may have ventured from the relative highlands of their chalk hills and valleys into the less hospitable wet flatlands.

A complex crop mark site within an arable field, first identified in 2010. The focus of the scheduling is a clear circular feature that is interpreted as being a Neolithic henge. This is set within and respected by a field system, suggesting that the henge was reused in the late Bronze Age as a ringwork: a high status domestic enclosure, a site type also known as a Springfield style enclosure. The core of the surrounding field system is also included in the scheduling.

(Entry from Historic England website historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1423379)