Dowsing at Seahenge

We were on our way to the site of the Seahenge timber monument when we came across the annual outing of a dowsing club. The chap leading the group told us that the place where we were standing was in fact the actual location, and not where we were heading for, which was a mile away, and near the golf course. You got the information off the internet, he said, which is deliberately misleading, to stop people digging around this area…and that’s understandable, I suppose. He’d marked the perimeter of the monument with small plastic yellow flags, and the dowsers were strolling around the vicinity. It was dug out from here, and is in King’s Lynn Museum now, he went on, but a few years later, they came across another similar site, only smaller, just a hundred yards away over there – he gesticulated vaguely to his left. It’s buried beneath the sand at the minute, but we’re going to go over in a little while and do some dowsing, and see what happens…
Although I’ve got a lot of time for the Norfolk Archaeology service, I think that in the case of Seahenge, they got it wrong. Whatever their reasons for doing so, digging up a bronze-age monument and sticking it in a museum is really just an act of cultural vandalism, and it’s interesting to compare that approach to the one adopted later when dealing with the Happisburgh footprints, which were left in situ after all the archaeological data had been gathered.