History of Kit’s Coty House and Little Kit’s Coty House
These two megalithic (huge stone) structures, 450 metres apart, were built nearly 6,000 years ago. They are the remains of burial monuments built to hold the bones of some of Britain’s earliest farmers.
Kit’s Coty House is an impressive burial chamber, made of four megaliths. The chamber stood at one end of a long mound, or barrow, which was flattened long ago. Little Kit’s Coty House was pulled down in about 1690, leaving a jumble of stones. There is no evidence of a long mound here, so perhaps it originally looked very different from its neighbour.
Kit’s Coty House became one of Britain’s first Scheduled Ancient Monuments in 1885, and the railings were installed soon after.
The river Medway and Neolithic settlement
Just over 6,000 years ago, families of Neolithic farmers in north-east France packed their dogs, sheep, cattle and cereal seeds into dugout canoes, and crossed the Channel.
These pioneers probably followed the navigable Medway inland. Where the river cuts through the North Downs (a ridge of chalk hills), they found clearings in the forest, springs and good soil. Presumably, the farmers also encountered the indigenous hunter-gatherers, who used different types of stone tools.
The settlers built at least seven burial monuments in this area. Kit’s Coty House has the best-preserved dolmen, or burial chamber, but large earthen mounds survive at two other sites. Archaeologists now suspect that several ‘standing stones’ once accepted as Neolithic are of much later date.
Upstream, archaeologists have excavated the remains of two ‘longhouses’, thought to have housed extended families. Radiocarbon dating has shown that these were built about 6,000 years ago, making them Britain’s earliest known Neolithic buildings. Each was nearly 20 metres long and up to 6 metres high.
About 300 years later, a large workforce built a gathering place for the community and its animals, located near Burham on a spur overlooking the river. An 800-metre-long perimeter of ditches and timber-faced banks enclosed an approximately circular area the size of seven football pitches. The scale of the enclosure must have impressed passing travellers.
Map showing the cluster of early Neolithic remains in the lower Medway valley, including the tombs and supposed standing stones collectively known as the ‘Medway megaliths’ (huge stones)
The geology of the North Downs
The Neolithic settlers built these monuments on a ridge of chalk hills known as the North Downs. Chalk is a soft, fine-grained rock, formed during the Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago) from the tiny skeletons of coccolithophores (microscopic sea algae) which built up as white mud on the floor of a warm, shallow sea. Over time, the mud was compacted and hardened under later layers of sediment.
About 65 million years ago – the time when dinosaurs became extinct – the same forces that created the Alps began to push the geological layers in south-east England and northern France upwards to form a huge dome. Subsequent erosion wore away the dome’s centre, leaving the North and South Downs ridges mirroring each other on opposite sides of the Weald. The chalk high ground of the North Downs extended from what is now Kent to northern France, forming a ridge that people and animals could cross.
Around 450,000 years ago, a ’megaflood’ burst through this soft chalk ridge from the North Sea, separating England from France and carving out the Strait of Dover. Dover Castle and the famous white cliffs stand on the northern side of this breach, facing the equally dramatic white cliffs of France.
Kit’s Coty and Little Kit’s Coty now sit within the Cross-Channel Geopark, a partnership between the Kent Downs National Landscape (England) and the Caps et Marais d’Opale Regional Nature Park (France).
An artist’s impression of the Dover Strait region about 450,000 million years ago, shortly before a huge flood from the North Sea (left) burst through the chalk ridge that once joined England to France
© Chase Stone/Imperial College London
Kit’s Coty House
The megalithic chamber called Kit’s Coty House comprises four large slabs of sarsen – the same hard sandstone as the biggest stones at Stonehenge. Sarsens of varying size and shape are scattered naturally across the North Downs, so the builders probably found these four nearby. Three vertical slabs form an H shape in plan (although the space towards the front of the tomb is larger), covered by a massive, slightly tilting ‘capstone’.
Conclusive evidence is unlikely to survive today, but the larger front half of the H was possibly a porch, with a natural gap in the cross-stone allowing access to human remains that were kept in the smaller rear half. In tombs like this, Neolithic people tended the bones of selected members of their communities, perhaps the pioneer migrants and their descendants.
In 1722 the antiquarian William Stukeley made two drawings showing a long mound, or barrow, extending west-north-west from the megalithic chamber. The mound then apparently stood about half as high as the stones, but later ploughing has almost flattened it. Modern archaeologists have traced the flanking ditches that provided material for the 80-metre-long mound.
Until its removal in 1867, a large slab called ‘The General’s Tombstone’ lay half-buried near the western end of the long barrow. Two barrows on the opposite side of the Medway had ‘kerbs’ of upright stones outlining them, so perhaps this apparent outlier was originally part of a similar kerb. Seventeen smaller stones spread within the chamber were probably unearthed by ploughing nearby, but were not necessarily parts of the monument.
Little Kit’s Coty House
In the 1670s, Dr Thomas Gale, Headmaster of St Paul's School in London, described Little Kit’s Coty House as ‘13 or 14 great stones; seven standing, all covered with one large stone, the rest are fallen down’.
About 20 years later, the structure was pulled apart, leaving a confusing jumble. Though sometimes called the Countless Stones, there are actually 20, some concealed under larger slabs.
When Hercules Ayleway visited in 1722, local people recalled that the vertical slabs ‘did all of them join close together so as to touch each other, and the door was on the west side thereof, next the road’. This is puzzling, because we know from most other Neolithic burial chambers in Britain that the entrance would usually face approximately east, with a mound extending to the west. No evidence for any mound has been identified and some archaeologists question whether the cluster of stones is artificial at all.
William Stukeley visited later that year and drew the collapsed stones, with Kit’s Coty House in the distance. Both Stukeley’s drawing and John Bayly’s watercolour painted 50 years later show two large, leaning slabs within the jumble. This hints that the stones have since been disturbed again, and that the structure once resembled Kit’s Coty House more closely than Gale’s description suggests.
Astronomical alignments
As well as facing roughly east, the tombs in the Medway group echo the natural landforms, suggesting that their locations were carefully chosen.
Patterns elsewhere in England suggest that lunar alignments were sometimes also important. Kit’s Coty House was oriented east-south-east – closer to the southernmost moonrise at a minor lunar solstice than to due east (sunrise at the spring and autumn equinoxes). Addington long barrow, to the west of the Medway, pointed towards the equivalent northernmost moonrise.
However, the height of the North Downs, and perhaps the forest canopy, would block easterly views. So perhaps Kit’s Coty House faced the point where the rising sun first became visible at the equinoxes, some way south of due east.
Alternatively, the builders may have designed the position and alignment of their monuments to dominate the world of the living. Stukeley’s drawing shows that Kit’s Coty House was conspicuous on the horizon when seen from the south and east, where the land around the springs was possibly settled and farmed. Little Kit’s Coty House, on the other hand, occupied a relatively low-lying position in the largely forested early Neolithic landscape, so evidently was not sited to be seen from far away.
Kit’s Coty House: what’s in a name?
Perhaps a local shepherd named Kit used the megalithic chamber as a tiny cottage, but more intriguing stories are linked to the unusual name.
Antiquarians often interpreted ancient remains in the light of events recorded in historical documents. The Battle of Aylesford, fought in 455 within sight of Kit’s Coty House, is chronicled in a history compiled in about 830 by a Welsh monk, Nennius. Catigern, a British prince, died at the battle, fighting against an Anglo-Saxon alliance led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa. In 1585 the antiquarian William Lambarde repeated a local legend that Catigern was buried at Kit’s Coty – the first recorded use of the name. Did the name Catigern change to Kit over the centuries?
Horsa too died in the battle, so perhaps ‘The General’s Tombstone’ also relates to this tradition. Some claimed that Horsa flew his battle standard – a rearing white stallion which became the emblem of Kent – from the nearby Lower White Horse Stone. That monolith was destroyed in the early 19th century.
Lambarde suspected that one of Julius Caesar’s commanders, Laberius Durus, was buried at Jullieberrie’s Grave, another Neolithic long barrow in Kent. Excavations in 1937 unearthed Romano-British burials there. Could the discovery of Roman artefacts have inspired the folklore?
Anglo-Saxons too were often buried in prehistoric monuments, so perhaps we should not totally dismiss the story of Catigern and Horsa. In 1824, the antiquarian Edward Rudge mentioned the discovery of ‘human bone and armour’ under Little Kit’s Coty House. If true, this could represent an Anglo-Saxon burial.
Archaeological investigations
The megalithic chamber of Kit’s Coty House was completely exposed by the mid 16th century, suggesting that crude excavations may already have taken place. James Douglas paid a labourer to dig within the chamber in about 1783, but concluded that somebody had already ‘explored’ it.
Many of England’s most eminent prehistorians visited the monuments over the next 200 years, but there were no major excavations. In 1854, Thomas Wright found ‘rude pottery under the monument’. In the 1930s fragments of later Neolithic pottery were found on the surface of the ploughed field.
Aerial photographs taken in 1940 first revealed ditches flanking the long barrow – the source of the material used to build the mound. Excavation of a small trench in 1956 suggested that sarsen kerbstones had been pushed into these ditches and buried to make ploughing easier.
A team from Birmingham University completed further fieldwork in 2009–11. Following geophysical surveys, they dug a trench across each ditch. They concluded that the monument may have evolved in several phases, but dating evidence remained elusive.
Excavation of a nearby monolith known as the Coffin Stone, long believed to have been part of a tomb, showed that it was set upright between 1450 and 1600. This is a reminder that the traditional belief that Little Kit’s Coty House is Neolithic remains unproven.
Victorian vandalism and protection
In 1882 Parliament passed the Ancient Monuments Protection Act and appointed the famous archaeologist Augustus Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) as the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments. When he visited the Medway tombs the following spring, he was alarmed by the vandalism Kit’s Coty House was suffering.
Several Victorians, including T Durban, A Neve, T May and H May, had carefully carved their names into the vertical cross-stone. Census records show that brothers Thomas and Henry May were born in the nearby village of Wateringbury in 1871 and 1883 respectively, so perhaps the separate graffiti mark their births.
Pitt Rivers was even more concerned that fires had been lit within the chamber, causing fragments to break off and risking the survival of the whole monument. In 1885 Kit’s Coty House became one of the first monuments in Britain to be given legal protection, but due to an administrative error, Little Kit’s Coty was not protected until two years later.
Meanwhile, Pitt Rivers spent £25 – a quarter of his annual budget – on installing the railings that still surround the chamber. As they did not also surround the long barrow, however, ploughing continued to damage it. After an excavation in 1956 demonstrated that the ditches alongside the mound survived, legal protection was extended to that part of the monument.
Kit’s Coty House and ‘Stig of the Dump’
Clive King (1924–2018) was brought up on the North Downs and drew on his memories to write his children’s book Stig of the Dump, published in 1963. It became very widely read, and has been studied in schools and twice adapted for the screen.
In the book a young boy, Barney, is spending the school summer holidays with his grandparents near Kit’s Coty House. He falls into an old chalk quarry being used as a rubbish dump, where he befriends a shabbily dressed, hairy man who calls himself Stig. They have a string of adventures together, and it gradually becomes clear that Stig has travelled forward in time from prehistory.
Stig is evidently an early Neolithic farmer, although Barney thinks of him as a ‘caveman’. On Midsummer’s Eve – the shortest night of the year – Barney and his sister are transported back into Stig’s time.
King’s story reflects contemporary ideas about the extent of the forest and the role of tombs in Neolithic society. The story’s climax imagines the community working together to drag the massive capstone up the sloping long barrow. The most dangerous moment comes at dawn, when, straining with ropes and levers, they lower it onto the uprights.
Further reading
Ashbee, P, ‘The Neolithic in Kent’, in An Historical Atlas of Kent, ed T Lawson and D Killingray (Chichester, 2004), 10–12
Ashbee, P, Kent in Prehistoric Times (Stroud, 2005)
Champion, T, ‘Prehistoric Kent’, in The Archaeology of Kent to AD 800, ed JH Williams, Kent History Project 8 (Woodbridge, 2007)
Evans, JH, ‘Kentish megalith types’, Archaeologia Cantiana 63 (1951), 63–81
Garwood, P, ‘The Medway Valley Prehistoric Landscapes project’, Past: The Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society 72 (2012), 1–3
Healy, F, ‘Causewayed enclosures and the Early Neolithic: the chronology and character of monument building and settlement in Kent, Surrey and Sussex in the early to mid-4th millennium cal BC’, contribution to the South East Research Framework resource assessment seminar (2008) (pdf download, accessed 23 April 2026)
Holgate, R, ‘The Medway megaliths and Neolithic Kent’, Archaeologia Cantiana 97 (1981), 221–34
King, C, Stig of the Dump (London, 1963)
Oswald, A, ‘Rivers, streams and springs: monuments and settlement in the lower Medway Valley, Kent’, chapter 9 of ‘“Patches of the endless forest”: monuments, landscape and remote perception in the Early Neolithic of southern Britain’, PhD thesis, University of York, 2003 (accessed 23 April 2026)
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