FOR many people, May Day is about enjoying a long bank holiday weekend, or going to the local fair.

But for pagans, the day marks an important ancient festival.

On Sunday, about 150 people met at Thornborough Henges, near Ripon, North Yorkshire, to celebrate Beltane.

The festival marks the coming of summer and celebrates the fertility-giving properties of flames and smoke.

Thornborough Henges is one of the country's most important ancient monuments. It has the greatest concentration of late Neolithic and early Bronze Age sites in the UK.

It is the central site in a complex of ancient monuments that create a 5,000-year- old landscape covering 20 miles of North Yorkshire, known as the Sacred Vale.

The henges - or prehistoric circles - are Britain's greatest Neolithic complex. They have been attracting druids throughout the ages.

Sunday's ceremony also attracted archaeologists, who are campaigning against a planning application by Tarmac to extend its sand and gravel extraction at the nearby Nosterfield Quarry.

The quarry produces more than 500,000 tonnes of sand and gravel each year.

Tarmac says the extension will not harm the henges, as the site is further away than the present quarry and more than half a mile from the nearest henge.

But campaigners say it is vital to preserve not just the henges themselves, but their setting.

Four horse burials were recently found by archaeologists in the area around the henges, which are a scheduled ancient monument.

On Sunday, the pagans, including many in costume, recreated a pagan sacrifice ritual, but using a pantomime horse.

It was "sacrificed" to bring good luck over the next year.

Event organiser Oliver Robinson said: "This is obviously intended to be light- hearted and to show we don't have to take ourselves too seriously, especially on May Day."

He also recited a poem commemorating "The Battle of the Beanfield", when police officers stopped hundreds of peace campaigners from setting up the 14th Stonehenge free festival in Wiltshire, in 1985.

Permission for Sunday's Beltane ceremony to be held was given by Tarmac and the land's tenant farmer, Robert Staveley.