Daily Telegraph, 14 Jan 1999
ARCHAEOLOGISTS are racing against time to discover all they can about this ancient ring of oak tree trunks - believed to be 4,000 years old - that emerged last year out of shifting sands off Holme next to the Sea, in Norfolk.
The structure, consisting of a large upturned tree surrounded by an oval of 54 trunks, is said to be of "enormous" archaeological importance and may be comparable to Stonehenge.
Experts are examining the ring before the sands shift again and the structure is lost for ever. They believe that the trunks, which have been preserved because they have been buried under sand and brine, were probably used for some form of religious ritual. The one at the centre may have been an altar on which the dead were placed.
"On a scale of one to 10, I would rank it as a 10 in terms of its significance," said Richard Morris, director of the Council for British Archaeology. "I'm not aware of anything like it. It is of enormous importance."
He said carbon dating and other tests would help establish a more precise age and give more definite clues to the purpose of the ring. He added that it might be possible to move the trees. But the wood would rot quickly once out of the sea. In any event, archaeologists could see little sense in taking the ring from where it was created and setting it up artificially on land.