- IT IS one of the eeriest and most mysterious
ancient monuments discovered in Britain.
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- A massive oak tree, stuck into the ground
upside down with its great spread of roots pointing skywards, stands surrounded
by a palisade-like circle of oak trunks. And it has just emerged from the
sea.
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- A wooden relative of Stonehenge, thought
to be some sort of altar, it has been revealed by the shifting sands of
Norfolk, where it had lain buried and preserved for thousands of years.
A beachcomber alerted archaeologists, who started excavating in October.
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- The site, on the lonely coast at Holme-next-the-Sea
near Hunstanton, is almost certainly ritual and probably to do with death.
Within its oval ring of 54 posts is the inverted oak tree with its roots,
"like a table with fingers", says Dr Francis Pryor, president
of the Council for British Archaeology. He believes it is very likely to
have been some form of altar.
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- The tree-temple - if that is what it
is -has been uncovered by tidal erosion. It is thought to have been constructed
in the early Bronze Age, between 2,000 and 1,200 BC, which would make it
almost a contemporary of Stonehenge.
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- The site, says Dr Pryor, is the most
extraordinary archaeological discovery he has ever seen and it must be
preserved.
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- However, unless difficult decisions are
taken soon about preserving it, it is likely to be destroyed by the action
of the tides within two years. No decision can be made until the site
is precisely dated. Carbon- dating of the wood is being carried out.
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- An excavation led by Mark Brennand of
Norfolk County Council's Archaeology Unit suggests that the tree-temple
was constructed on swampy ground some way inland, which the sea covered
at a later date.
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- Mr Brennand believes the purpose of the
site was probably excarnation - the practice of exposing the bodies of
the dead so that the flesh rotted more quickly, thus, it was thought, speeding
the spirit on its way to the afterlife.
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- Dr Pryor added that for our ancestors
oak was a special wood : "The inverted oak is not just utilitarian,
a simple way of making an altar. It is a very complex symbolic statement.
Perhaps a little sinister. It is the world turned upside down."
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