The police were alerted to the disturbed earth which became the scene of last night's search for the two missing girls by a jogger, who had first approached them a week earlier saying he had heard screams from the same area the night the girls disappeared.
The jogger told police on August 6th that on the night the girls disappeared, he heard teenagers' screams coming from the area as he walked his dog.
Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both 10, vanished from their home in the Cambridgeshire market town of Soham at around 7 p.m. on Sunday August the 4th.
Between three and four hours later a Newmarket man heard screams coming from the woods bordering training grounds used by locals to ride their horses and believed they were those of teenagers or possibly mating foxes.
"He assumed it was children and there are foxes in the area and screaming is not an unusual sound," a police spokesman said yesterday.
But two days later when he heard that the girls had vanished he went straight to Newmarket police station and reported the screaming.
"He was immediately seen by police, but clearly all we had was that it was from the area of the woods and it's a difficult and large area," added Cambridgeshire Police spokeswoman Ms Kim Perks.
Yesterday morning that same man came across disturbed earth when he returned to the area to go jogging.
Last night British police and forensic experts investigating the disappearance of the two 10-year-old schoolgirls were examining the disturbed earth in woodland near to where the girls went missing 10 days ago.
"An initial assessment of the sight has led us to believe the earth has been recently disturbed," said Det Chief Insp Andy Hebb.
"We are mindful of the need to make a full examination of the area." A police spokesman added: "Senior detectives attended the area at approximately 4:25 p.m. and it was decided it needed further attention.
"The area has been cordoned off and scenes of crime officers and forensic experts are at the site," he said.
The area under investigation was a heath in a wooded part of Warren Hill, near Newmarket, less than 10 miles from where the girls disappeared on August 4th.
The two areas of disturbed earth were 30 metres apart, added the spokeswoman.
The girls' disappearance from their home in Soham, near the university town of Cambridge, has led to one of the country's largest ever hunts for missing people.
Police yesterday defended their handling of the intensive search after coming under fire for responding slowly to key witness information.
Officers were under pressure to explain why it took them four days to quiz a taxi driver who said he might have seen the girls in a car on the night they went missing.
"All I can do is reiterate that every piece of the vast amount of information we have received is extremely important and treated seriously," Mr Hebb said earlier.
"Each and every piece of information is assessed and prioritised according to the current direction of the inquiry," Mr Hebb told a press conference where he defended the way the police were tackling the case.
Taxi driver Mr Ian Webster, (56) had told reporters that on the night of the girls' disappearance, he saw a green car, carrying two small children, being driven erratically.
Mr Hebb said there had been a surge in numbers of people offering information since Mr Webster's sighting was publicised - around 1,800 in 24 hours. Previously, officers had been receiving around 1,000 calls per day.
The girls, wearing identical red Manchester United jerseys, disappeared from a Wells family barbecue. Both had apparently logged on to the internet shortly before they vanished.
Some 320 police officers and civilians from all over Britain are tackling the case, and more than 400 house-to-house inquiries have been carried out.
Both Holly and Jessica have been portrayed in the British news media as happy, bright children from solid English middle class families.
Most missing children in Britain are either runaways or targets of parental abduction. - (AFP)