An ancient quern stone was found by greenkeepers at Leighton Buzzard golf course in Bedfordshire (England) as they dug out a new tee. "The guys were digging the fourth tee to renew it and about a metre down they found this flat round object around 14 inches in diameter which turned out to be a quern stone" Club Captain Neil Bagshawe  said.
     Quern stones were used for grinding corn before the introduction of mill stones, but despite this, it's not actually that common to find one. "Apparently only three have ever been discovered in the south of England so it is quite rare" said Mr Bagshawe, "and even rarer to find one that is completely intact. "You can still see the marks that are necessary to actually effect the grinding mechanism to make sure that you do get the corn out at the end, so it's obviously been made by man as opposed to being a natural object," he added.
     Mr Bagshawe explained how the stone could date back over 2,000 years from what was already known about the golf course land. "There's evidence going way back that there were Iron Age settlements on that land" he said, "basically small holdings after herder gatherers gave way to settlements. So it's been inhabited from the late Iron Age which was the last century BCE."

Edited from BBC News (4 November 2010)