Everyone who visited Seahenge felt that they were in the presence of something mysterious and powerful. Mark Brennand, of Norfolk County's Archaeology Unit, said, "I find it eerie and profoundly moving. All the hard-bitten archaeologists who saw it out there felt the same. You're directly in the presence of the past at a very personal level."

Seahenge had been preserved by a blanket of peat, now washed away. Exposure to the air meant that it would soon begin to decay. So English Heritage decided to remove the structure, for preservation and tests. This decision caused bitter controversy, as locals objected that they had not been consulted about ''their'' Seahenge. Neo-pagans and modern druids also protested at what they saw as the destruction of a sacred site. On June 15, 1999, as the excavation began, Rollo Maughfling, Arch-Druid of Stonehenge, formally claimed Seahenge as a surviving druid temple. Maughfling later described the moment:

"With my heart thumping nineteen to the dozen, and the waves soaking the bottom of my ceremonial robes, I waded out into the sea and climbed up onto the central altar of the Seahenge oak timbered circle, and began to make our druidic proclamation to the assembled crowd of onlookers, well-wishers, and others."

The protestors then watched helplessly as the central stump was lifted and taken away.

What the archaeologists discovered

The archaeologists took the timbers to the laboratories at Flag Fen, the Bronze Age centre near Peterborough. Here tree ring analysis revealed that the central stump was uprooted in the spring of 2049 BC, when it was already 167 years old. This dates Seahenge to the very beginning of the Bronze Age.

Laser scanning of the timbers showed that between 51 and 59 bronze axes had been used to chop them down, suggesting that Seahenge was the work of a whole community. Francis Pryor, director of Flag Fen, said, "It is remarkable that this tiny community was able to lay hands on such a large number of tools, only about 100 years after the knowledge of how to make bronze arrived in this country."

The purpose of Seahenge remains a mystery. For Arch-Druid Rollo Maughfling, it was an altar "where the skulls of important chieftains kept watch over the shoreline to protect us from attack". The archaeologists have suggested that it may have been used for "excarnation" - the practice of exposing dead bodies on a raised platform to be picked clean by birds, leaving bones for burial. Francis Pryor believes that the sea was thought of as the "dwelling place of the ancestors. Seahenge was deliberately placed between the ancestral world – the sea – and that of the living – the land, tying the two together."

Over the next few years, the timbers will be conserved by the Mary Rose trust at Portsmouth. It is hoped that Seahenge may one day go on public display, perhaps in King's Lynn Museum. Find the Flag Fen site on Seahenge here