Seahenge, Norfolk: The ancient Bronze Age circle that lay hidden for 4,000 years

Seahenge lay beneath the shifting sands of the north Norfolk coast almost until the dawn of the 21st century.

The sacred 4000 year old site of Seahenge exposed briefly by the shifting sands on the Norfolk coast near Hunstanton.
The sacred 4000 year old site of Seahenge exposed briefly by the shifting sands on the Norfolk coast near Hunstanton.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

In 1998, a man named John Lorimer was walking along the beach at Holme-next-the-Sea when he stumbled upon an extraordinary Bronze Age timber circle that had emerged overnight from East Anglia’s shifting sands.

Archaeologists and druids flocked to see the 55 posts circling an upside-down tree, roots in the air, a relic from 2050 BC.

Cast replica of Seahenge prehistoric tree stump at the King's Lynn Museum, Norfolk.

This 8ft-wide centrepiece — which was felled in springtime, scientists say, and may have been a ceremonial place from which decaying bodies could travel to the afterlife — is now on display at the Lynn Museum, King’s Lynn, together with half the original timbers and a life-size replica of what has become known as Seahenge.

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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.