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A long history
The area we're concerned with lies at the gateway to the modern city, and to the medieval one that came before it. Humans have been seeking their livelihood here since prehistoric times.

The very first human settlers in Whitlingham, thirty or forty thousand years ago, may possibly have walked across a bridge of land or ice where the straits of Dover now are. We know that later people, in the palaeolithic period worked flint there - the durable and beautiful material so characteristic of Norfolk building, from which their medieval successors created a multitude of glorious city churches.

And the most recent find of rare flint tools, from the archaeological dig at Carrow Road Football Ground, shows that 12,000 years ago, in the Upper Palaeolithic, this was a rural landscape where people hunted and fished.

Three thousand years ago, near where a modern electricity substation now stands, there was a sacred site, where men working with bronze tools put up a horse-shoe shaped cluster of huge oak pillars nearly a metre thick and five metres long - the Arminghall henge.

Nothing of it remains above ground, but aerial photographs revealed its ground plan more than 70 years ago.

Click to view larger picture.
Arminghall Henge.

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