Lancashire is a ceremonial county in North West England. The administrative centre is Preston; the county has an area of 1,189 square miles. People from Lancashire are known as Lancastrians; the history of Lancashire begins with its founding in the 12th century. In the Domesday Book of 1086, some of its lands were treated as part of Yorkshire; the land that lay between the Ribble and Mersey, Inter Ripam et Mersam, was included in the returns for Cheshire. When its boundaries were established, it bordered Cumberland, Westmorland and Cheshire. Lancashire emerged as a major industrial region during the Industrial Revolution. Liverpool and Manchester grew into its largest cities, with economies built around the docks and the cotton mills respectively; these cities dominated the birth of modern industrial capitalism. The county contained the collieries of the Lancashire Coalfield. By the 1830s 85% of all cotton manufactured worldwide was processed in Lancashire. Accrington, Bolton, Bury, Colne, Manchester, Oldham, Preston and Wigan were major cotton mill towns during this time.

Blackpool was a centre for tourism for the inhabitants of Lancashire's mill towns during wakes week. The historic county was subject to a significant boundary reform in 1974 which created the current ceremonial county and removed Liverpool and Manchester, most of their surrounding conurbations to form the metropolitan and ceremonial counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester; the detached northern part of Lancashire in the Lake District, including the Furness Peninsula and Cartmel, was merged with Cumberland and Westmorland to form Cumbria. Lancashire lost 709 square miles of land to other counties, about two fifths of its original area, although it did gain some land from the West Riding of Yorkshire. Today the ceremonial county borders Cumbria to the north, Greater Manchester and Merseyside to the south, North and West Yorkshire to the east; the county palatine boundaries remain the same as those of the pre-1974 county with Lancaster serving as the county town, the Duke of Lancaster exercising sovereignty rights, including the appointment of lords lieutenant in Greater Manchester and Merseyside.

The county was established in 1182 than many other counties. During Roman times the area was part of the Brigantes tribal area in the military zone of Roman Britain; the towns of Manchester, Ribchester, Burrow and Castleshaw grew around Roman forts. In the centuries after the Roman withdrawal in 410AD the northern parts of the county formed part of the Brythonic kingdom of Rheged, a successor entity to the Brigantes tribe. During the mid-8th century, the area was incorporated into the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria, which became a part of England in the 10th century. In the Domesday Book, land between the Ribble and Mersey were known as "Inter Ripam et Mersam" and included in the returns for Cheshire. Although some historians consider this to mean south Lancashire was part of Cheshire, it is by no means certain, it is claimed that the territory to the north formed part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. It bordered on Cumberland, Westmorland and Cheshire; the county was divided into the hundreds of Amounderness, Leyland, Lonsdale and West Derby.

Lonsdale was further partitioned into Lonsdale North, the detached part north of the sands of Morecambe Bay including Furness and Cartmel, Lonsdale South. Lancashire is smaller than its historical extent following a major reform of local government. In 1889, the administrative county of Lancashire was created, covering the historic county except for the county boroughs of Barrow-in-Furness, Bolton, Burnley, Liverpool, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, St. Helens and Wigan The area served by the Lord-Lieutenant covered the entirety of the administrative county and the county boroughs, was expanded whenever boroughs annexed areas in neighbouring counties such as Wythenshawe in Manchester south of the River Mersey and in Cheshire, southern Warrington, it did not cover the western part of Todmorden, where the ancient border between Lancashire and Yorkshire passes through the middle of the town. During the 20th century, the county became urbanised the southern part. To the existing county boroughs of Barrow-in-Furness, Bolton, Burnley, Liverpool, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, St. Helens and Wigan were added Warrington and Southport.

The county boroughs had many boundary extensions. The borders around the Manchester area were complicated, with narrow protrusions of the administrative county between the county boroughs – Lees urban district formed a detached part of the administrative county, between Oldham county borough and the West Riding of Yorkshire. By the census of 1971, the population of Lancashire and its county boroughs had reached 5,129,416, making it the most populous geographic county in the UK; the administrative county was the most populous of its type outside London, with a population of 2,280,359 in 1961. On 1 April 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, the southern part of the administrative county was transferred to the two newly-established metropolitan counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester; the new county of Cumbria incorporated the Furness exclave. From the same date; the boroughs of Liverpool, Knowsley, St. Helens and Sefton were included i

The Temple of the Stars is an alleged ancient temple claimed to be situated around Glastonbury in Somerset, England. The temple is claimed by some to depict a colossal landscape zodiac, a map of the stars on a gigantic scale, formed by features in the landscape; the theory was first put forward in 1934 by Katherine Maltwood, an artist who "discovered" the zodiac in a vision, held that the "temple" was created by Sumerians in about 2700 BC. The idea was revived in 1969 by Mary Caine in an article in the magazine Gandalf's Garden. Compared to Maltwood's version, she turned Scorpio upside down, added a monk to Gemini, altered the outlines of Capricorn and Leo; the temple plays an important role in many occult theories. It has been associated with the Grail legend, Uther Pendragon, King Arthur; the idea was examined by two independent studies, one by Ian Burrow in 1975 and the other in 1983 by Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, using the standard methods of landscape historical research. Both studies concluded.

The eye of Capricorn identified by Maltwood was a haystack. The western wing of the Aquarius phoenix was a road laid in 1782 to run around Glastonbury, older maps dating back to the 1620s show the road had no predecessors; the Cancer boat is made up of a network of eighteenth century drainage paths. There are some Neolithic paths preserved in the peat of the bog comprising most of the area, but none of the known paths match the lines of the zodiac features. Glastonbury historian Geoffrey Ashe commented, "The phenomenon is akin to the Rorschach ink-blot test, or to seeing pictures in a fire", "Zodiac-finders do not themselves agree on these'obvious figures'. I have studied these photographs. There is no support for this theory, or for the existence of the "temple" in any form, from conventional archaeologists or mainstream historians. Brinsley le Poer Trench Temple of the Stars Katherine E. Maltwood A Guide to Glastonbury's Temple of the Stars Peter James & Nick Thorpe Ancient Mysteries, Ballantine Books, New York, pp 298–304 Reiser, Oliver L This Holyest Erthe: The Glastonbury Zodiac and King Arthur's Camelot, Perennial Books Brian Haughton, Haunted Spaces, Sacred Places: A Field Guide To Stone Circles, Crop Circles, Ancient Tombs, Supernatural Landscapes.

ISBN 978-1-60163-000-1 Slaine,Temple of the Stars,2000AD Comic, Prog 493, 25 Oct 1986 Map of the zodiac

The Minong Mine is a mine site located west of McCargoe Cove campground on Isle Royale National Park, United States containing both the remnants of a 19th-century copper mine and remains of prehistoric mining activity. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. Native Americans first began mining copper at the Minong Mine site 4500 years ago, using stone implements to extract the pure copper available at the site and cold-hammering the metal to form spear points and other implements; these prehistoric miners created pits, some as much as 30 feet deep, that can still be seen at the site. Some pits showed evidence of early engineering efforts, using boulders to support the walls of the pit and drains to remove water. There was evidence that these ancient miners utilized fire-setting, where rocks were split by heating them with fire and cooling them with water to extract the copper within; when re-discovered in the 19th century, the prehistoric excavations in the Minong Mine area were described as extending "in a continuous line for more than two miles, in most instances the pits being so close together as to permit their convenient working."

A number of ancient mining artifacts were collected from the Minong site. In addition, a fragment of a wooden bowl about three feet across, a wooden shovel, a rawhide string were discovered at the site. Modern copper mining on Isle Royale was begun in the 1840s and 1850s, although not at the Minong Mine site; this activity ceased in 1855, for a number of years there were no permanent inhabitants on the island. In 1871, a group of explorers working for the North American Mineral Land Company arrived on the island. In the fall of that year, the explorers found the old Native American pit mines west of McCargoe Cove. In 1872, a group of prospectors staked out the Minong Mine. In late 1874, the Minong Mining Company was organized in Detroit to mine the copper deposits in the area; the name "Minong" was taken from an Ojibwa word for "island" in general and Isle Royale in particular. This company purchased land from the North American Mineral Land Company and commenced a mining operation in 1875. Most of the copper mining was still done in open pit mining, but two shafts, one over 300 feet, were sunk at the mine.

In 1875, more than 50 people were working at the Minong Mine and living in the nearby settlement of Cove, at the end of McCargoe Cove. At the height of the Minong operation, some 150 miners were employed at the mine. A railroad ran between the mine proper and Cove, the mining settlement had a post office, a dam, a stamp mill, a dock, a blacksmith's shop; the mine produced some large nuggets of copper. This copper mass showed evidence of being worked by prehistoric miners, "the surface of the mass had evidently been beaten up into projecting ridges... depressions, several inches deep, the intervening elevations, with their fractured summits, covering every foot of the exposed superficies." In 1878, a copper mass weighing six tons was discovered, in 1879 two nuggets of 3317 and 4175 pounds were discovered. In 1879, the Minong Mining Company was reorganized to form the Minong Copper Company, with its headquarters located in Detroit; the Minong Copper Company continued work until June 1883, when they suspended mining operations, due in part to the low price of copper.

A few individuals continued mining operations for another two years or so, but by 1885 all activity had ceased. In the ten years between 1875 and 1885, Minong Mine produced 249 tons of copper. However, the amount of copper produced dwindled, the mine was abandoned in 1885; the area around Minong Mine sports small prehistoric pits, as well as the larger pits and shafts from the 1870s mine. Piles of tailings, the wreckage of a smithy, railroad tracks, ore carts are at the site; as of 1994, the dam near McCargoe Cove was still intact. Copper mining in Michigan Documents of the Minong Mining Company and Minong Copper Company, 1875