archaeology – Mick Canning

Although not perhaps the first county one would think of when discussing ancient standing stones, Kent does have its share. There are two main sites approximately equidistant on either side of the river Medway in north Kent. The eastern site consists of the remains of two burial chambers (Kit’s Coty House and Little Kit’s Coty House) and the White Horse Stone, all within a kilometre of each other, while the western site consists of the Coldrum Stones (burial chamber) and Addington Long Barrow and Addington Burial Chamber.

The Coldrum Stones

At Little Kit’s Coty House in a light drizzle, I counted seventeen stones, although Donald Maxwell writing in The Pilgrim’s Way in Kent, a short guide published in 1932, claims twelve to fourteen. Various other authorities suggest between nineteen and twenty-one. This is one of those sets of remains that comprise such a jumble of stones it is supposedly impossible to accurately count them – and just to make it harder, they are also supposed to move around (presumably when no one is looking). Thus they are also known by the name The Countless Stones. The largest ones I reckoned were about four meters by two and about three and a half meters by three. The shapes are very irregular, and since they are in a collapsed state there might have been serious damage to some of them. I immediately wondered whether it had originally been the same shape as Kit’s Coty House, a Neolithic chambered long barrow, just a few hundred meters to the north, where the stones are in the form of a dolmen, which would have been a burial chamber at one end of an eighty-four meter mound.

The Countless Stones, or Little Kit’s Coty House

William Stukeley, writing in 1722, recorded that he was told local people remembered a chamber at Little Kit’s Coty House. It had had a covering stone and was pulled down in about 1690.

Both Kit’s Coty House and Little Kit’s Coty House are reckoned to be just under six thousand years old.

Kit’s Coty House

Some nine or ten kilometres away across the Medway Valley are the Coldrum Stones, or Coldrum Long Barrow, dated to between 3985 and 3855 BC. These ones, looked after by the National Trust, are also a burial chamber. Donald Maxwell claimed that there were forty-one stones and that a further fifteen were broken up at an unspecified date during quarrying work. Maxwell also reported a tradition ‘amongst the country people’ that an avenue of stones stretched across the valley from Coldrum to Kit’s Coty, although there is no evidence it ever existed. But coincidence or not, both of these chambers are situated at the same height, about eighty five meters above sea level.

All three burial chambers, then, have been dated to the same period, a thousand years before Stonehenge was built. It seems reasonable, then, to assume they were produced by the same society.

Coldrum has been proved to be a family tomb, the remains of at least 22 people being interred there, with DNA analysis proving their likely close family relationship. Yet amongst these kinsfolk, recent isotopic analysis has shown that maybe the chamber also contained the remains of individuals interred in the fifth to seventh centuries AD.

The White Horse Stone

I say maybe, as there is a very strong caveat connected to this research, and that is that when the human remains were removed in the early twentieth century they were not only not labelled very thoroughly, but they were also passed around several museums and the possibility exists that some bones ended up mis-accredited. Yet it has been proven that some neolithic burial chambers were re-used for burials in the early Anglo-Saxon period.*

The land here has been sculpted by man. Of course, we sculpt the land more and more violently and obviously in the twenty first century, but here, from all these thousands of years ago, are these simple shapes built by ancient folk to inter and celebrate their dead. And these were interactive places. Evidence from other sites shows that some of the bones of these ancestors would be removed at times, although whether as a simple reminder of their elders, or whether for magic or sacred purposes, can only be conjecture. But I like the thought that these bones might be invested with power, that they could be brought into the everyday for protective or ritual purpose.

Now, we view them in a different light, and their sacredness has evaporated. Like a deconsecrated church, but without ever having been formally deconsecrated. It is possible our ancestors would view our visits there as desecration.

But I’m never sure whether you can take any arrangement of stones for granted; they’ve been dismantled in the past, could they have been reassembled?

Incidentally, for those who enjoy Ley Lines, it is worth mentioning that the Ley Line hunter Paul Devereux has described a line passing through The Coldrum Stones and aligning with six nearby churches. Although just to put a dampener on that, perhaps it is also worth mentioning that students at Cambridge University investigated this particular line using computer simulations based on the Ordnance Survey details and concluded that it wasn’t statistically significant – that it was almost certainly just a chance alignment. You takes your pick.

*Research carried out by members of Durham University, Oxford University School of Archaeology and British Geological Survey (Isotope Facility) 2022

Silbury Hill, located a few miles from Avebury in Wiltshire, is the largest artificial mound in Europe, roughly the same size as the contemporaneous Egyptian pyramids, although it puts me more in mind of the Mexican pyramids. At 39m high and 160m wide and built of chalk, it was a colossal undertaking for the time – it was completed approximately four thousand four hundred years ago. Yet its purpose remains unknown; apparently it contains no burial, although folklore ascribes to it the final resting place of King Sil. Other theories connect it with the Goddess, and others yet suggest it as an observatory or sundial, although since Stonehenge was already in existence at the time of its construction, albeit in an earlier form as a henge monument, it seems highly unlikely that so much effort would have been put into the building of a mere mound, no matter how huge, if that was intended as its sole purpose.

Archaeological evidence suggests it was constructed over around a hundred years and there was probably a track spiralling around the hill to the top – used both in its construction and then afterwards to access the top of the hill which appeared to originally be flat. And that there was a constant tweaking of the shape over the following years, as though succeeding generations each felt the need to make their mark on the site.

Allowing for the fact it would have been a little higher due to the effects of weathering over the last four thousand years, it would have been as high as the nearby hills, Waden Hill and Knoll Down, but the difference would have been striking, since this perfectly shaped mound would have been dazzlingly white. The effect of the hill on anyone approaching would have been remarkable. Imagine it gleaming like a snow-covered mountain in the sunshine, or glowing mysteriously at night in a thin moonlight.

This isn’t something a tribe decided to do because they had some time on their hands – they’d had a good day’s hunting and the roof had been fixed, so why not? And not something just done on a whim – ‘You know, I like this place, but I really rather fancy putting a large hill just over there.’ This was a long term project, literally a lifetime’s work. And it was intended as one heck of a statement. Like a Medieval cathedral or Trump Tower, it was intended to be seen from a long way away and admired and talked about, although which of those two did it resemble? Was it the narcissistic project of an egotistical power-hungry madman or was it intended to glorify something greater than them?

On balance, I suspect the latter. Even if the project was begun by one strong-minded individual intent on somehow making a name for himself, it wouldn’t have been completed until long after his (or her) death, suggesting there was still a strong driving-force to complete the project.

But this is an area absolutely heaving with ancient monuments. Although Stonehenge is some twenty miles to the south, West Kennet long barrow is less than a mile away, Avebury Henge and stone circles only slightly further, and within the immediate landscape there are any number of burial mounds and standing stones. By any standard, this is a prehistoric landscape, and the visitor here must be looking at the evidence of ancient societies for whom memory and ritual were of great importance and significance.

I said earlier that there is no evidence of burials in the hill, yet all that means is that surveys have not revealed any chambers within the mound, or back-filled tunnels that might have been used to access the same. Yet I do wonder whether the entire structure might have been raised over the burial of an important personage. Perhaps future generations will find out.