An oyster fisherman is thought to have stumbled across a 4,000-year-old track once used by the Bronze Age elite of Essex to expand their settlements.
Daniel French discovered the wooden planks almost half a mile offshore from Mersea Island as he was harvesting the shellfish.
His discovery last month prompted a retrieval effort by an archaeological group that feared the growing number of storm surges on the east coast would hide the route for ever.
Radiocarbon and dendrochronology testing will be used on the timbers, thought to be oak, to establish when during the Bronze Age the path was constructed.
Archaeologists with the coastal and intertidal zone archaeological network (Citizan), an organisation that records finds exposed at low tide, said early indications were that the…