FLYING MAN’S FIND

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 22 June 1936, Page 10

FLYING MAN’S FIND

About 18,000 years ago men working with rough bronze tools in what we now call Norfolk built a horseshoe of oak tree trunks as a temple to their gods. The men died. The trunks decayed. One summer’s day a young man in an airplane saw two slightly darker rings in the grass below him. It was an R.A.F. ’plane doing R.A.F. work, so Group-Captain G. S. M. Insall, V.C., M.C., controlled his excitement till he was off duty. Then he hired a- private ’plane, returned, and took a photograph. From that photograph of a field at Arminghall, near Norwich, and the happy accident that an airman had archaeology as his hobby, had come the discovery of a wooden Stonehenge—a “woodhenge,” archaeologists call it. Dr. Graham Clark, of Cambridge, undertook excavations. The photograph told him and his helpers just what to expect, and they were able to dig without injuring the handiwork of the men who died 16,000 years before Christ. They found the temple exactly as it had been left, except that the tree trunks had rotted. First there was a shallow circular ditch. Within that was a mound, giving into a deeper ditch. The middle of the circle was a flat space in which were eight holes, in horseshoe arrangement, where the tree-pil-lars had been. Cutting right through the two ditches and the mound was a flat patch which had obviously been the entrance.