The discovery of an early henge at Norton, Hertfordshire by local archaeologists

The story begins in 1936. Major Allen, a pioneer of aerial photography in Britain, flew over a field to the east of the young Letchworth Garden City and spotted a large ring in the crop, which he duly photographed.

Figure 5/6 The Middle Neolithic house foundations found in 2013

Like so many such cropmarks in North Hertfordshire, it was long assumed to be the traces of a ditch that would have formed a quarry for material to make an earlier Bronze Age burial mound. Subsequent photographs taken during the 1960s and 70s appeared to confirm this supposition.

Then, in 1994, there was a proposal to locate a new cemetery in this field. Because of the known archaeological sensitivity of the area, a geophysical survey was commissioned; owing to the technique used, magnetometry, only the north-western half of the field could be surveyed, as the south-eastern end of the field is crossed by high-tension power lines. Nevertheless, this monument was covered by the survey, which revealed what was described by the surveyors as a “double ring ditch”. [...] heritagedaily.com