Archaeologists, who found the metre-wide slab of sandstone half buried in the ash, believe that its distinctive markings could depict a mountainscape with fields and a house in the foreground.

Neil Redfern, an inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage, said that the decorations were unlike any- thing else known of the period. “It suggests for the first time that the people were as intellectually aware of their surroundings as we are today and made efforts to depict it,” he said. “Who knows? This could once have been hanging on the wall of a Brone Age farmer.”

The stone is the most valuable of more than 2,400 artefacts uncovered last September by the blaze which exposed a 2½sq km section of Fylingdales Moor, west of Ravenscar. The site, which shows evidence of human habitation across four millennia, is to be designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and will become the focus of a project to restore the ecology of the moor. Mr Redfern said: “When we stepped over the scorched terrain and reviewed aerial photographs, we were confronted by a vast number of features we had no idea existed before. To find such well-preserved signs of settlement and human activity over such a long period in such a small area is amazing.

“We expected to find up to 500 artefacts exposed by the fire. In the end, we found almost 2,500 from Stone Age arrow heads to bullets from Second World War training exercises.” Among the archaeologists’ haul were Mesolithic flints, carved rocks, old track ways, leats and waterways, once used in the alum industry, and even a Second World War trench, dug when the moor was used as a military training ground.

At first archaeologists did not know what to make of the stone which had wavy lines and jagged peaks and a series of intersecting lines. It was not until the stone was rotated through 90 degrees and photographed with a laser scanner that the image of a landscape became clear. The wavy lines became clouds, the zigzags a mountain range and the intersecting lines a series of field boundaries. A series of triangles on its right-hand side arranged in a cross shape could be a hut and an extra triangle on one side could be an opening or doorway.

Mr Redfern said: “There are many rock carvings in this part of the world, but they are all of the cup-and-ring type, small circular depressions and circles cut into the stone. This was so different. It is incised with straight lines that criss-cross the surface forming a strange pattern. If this is what we think is it is, it is going to turn our view of the culture of this period upside down.”

The stone will be reburied in its original site which will be recorded using satellite mapping techniques. “Where else should it go?” said Mr Redfern. “We have recorded its image. Why should it go to, say the British Museum? It was found here, so should remain here.”

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