Danish archaeologists have uncovered a 4,000-year-old circle of wooden piles that they say could be linked to Britain’s world-renowned Stonehenge.

The 45 neolithic-era wooden pieces, in a circle with a diameter of about 30 metres (100 feet), were found during work on a housing estate in the northwestern town of Aars. The piles are about two metres apart.

“It is a once-in-a-lifetime find,” Sidsel Wahlin, conservationist at the town’s Vesthimmerland museum, said in an e-mail to AFP.

The circle “points to a strong connection with the British henge world”, she added.

The two circles of stones at Stonehenge in southern England are believed to have been erected between 3100 BC and 1600 BC.

The Danish archaeologists are now trying to find if there is an inner circle at the Aars site.

Wahlin said that some timber circles, considered part of worshipping of the sun, have been found on the Danish island of Bornholm.

She added that the circle in Aars was “the first one of this larger type that we can properly investigate”.

Archaeologists first found an early Bronze Age (1700-1500 BC) settlement at the building site that included a chieftains grave and a bronze sword, Wahlin said.

“When I and my colleague opened a new section of the excavation the expected house and some fence quickly turned out to be the entrance area of a very well planned, slightly oval structure,” she added.

The wooden circle is estimated to date from about 2000 BC but Wahlin said the team had started detailed work on Monday to definitively identify its age and function.

The archaeologists are now looking for “ritual deposits” such as flint arrowheads and daggers as part of a major sampling exercise at the site.

Wahlin said the next searches would seek to find if there were links between the region and other peoples, such as those who built Stonehenge. She said the influence of other regions could be seen in the pottery and graves that had been found.