Tetney Golf Club Bronze Age coffin to be displayed

The "significant find" is being preserved with the help of a £70,000 grant from Historic England

A 4,000-year-old wooden coffin found by chance on a golf course is to go on display.

The 10ft (3m) long Bronze Age relic, containing the remains of a man holding an axe, were uncovered during work on a pond in July 2018.

Experts believe the site, under Tetney Golf Club, Lincolnshire, was the burial place of a high-status individual.

Two years of preservation work will take place before it is exhibited at the Lincoln Collection Museum.

Describing the coffin, made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, as a "significant find", Historic England said plants were used to cushion the body and a gravel mound was raised over the grave.

Golf club owner Mark Casswell said his family had farmed the land for years and had never imagined "there was a whole other world there buried under the fields".

"It's amazing how well-preserved the axe is with its handle still there like it was made yesterday," he said.

"We'll have a nice photograph of it up on the clubhouse wall, all those years that people have been living here working the land, it's certainly something to think about while you're playing your way round the course."

The preserved axe will go on display at the Lincoln Collection Museum

Historic England has given a £70,000 grant towards preservation.

The agency said work on the axe had been completed, but it would be another two years until the coffin could be displayed.

"The man buried at Tetney lived in in a very different world to ours but, like ours, it was a changing environment, rising sea levels and coastal flooding ultimately covered his grave and burial mound in a deep layer of silt that aided its preservation," it added.