Little Kit's Coty House Megalithic Tomb.

Reasons for Designation

Long barrows were constructed as earthen or drystone mounds with flanking ditches and acted as funerary monuments during the Early and Middle Neolithic periods (3400-2400 BC). They represent the burial places of Britain's early farming communities and, as such, are amongst the oldest field monuments surviving visibly in the present landscape. Where investigated, long barrows appear to have been used for communal burial, often with only parts of the human remains having been selected for interment. Certain sites provide evidence for several phases of funerary monument preceding the barrow and, consequently, it is probable that long barrows acted as important ritual sites for local communities over a considerable period of time. Some 500 long barrows are recorded in England. As one of the few types of Neolithic structure to survive as earthworks, and due to their comparative rarity, their considerable age and their longevity as a monument type, all long barrows are considered to be nationally important.

The atypical example of Little Kit's Coty House represents an unusual variant of this class of monument but nevertheless forms part of the group of Neolithic burial monuments known as the Medway Megaliths. Being held in Guardianship, the monument is of high amenity value.

Details

Little Kit's Coty House, also known as The Countless Stones, is situated near the foot of the North Downs scarp some 600m from the Kits Coty House Long Barrow. It comprises a group of ca.20 sarsen boulders in a tight cluster and represents the remains of a burial chamber which was seriously damaged in 1690 before any reliable records were made. The stones and an area immediately around them are in the Guardianship of English Heritage. The understanding of the monument relies heavily on the reconstructions made by Stukeley in 1722 based on information from a correspondent who remembered the monument before its alteration. The reconstructions suggest a monument somewhat similar in its original form to that at Coldrum, 10km to the west, with a burial chamber in which skeletons may have been deposited, an earthen mound partially or completely covering the chamber and a revetting wall of smaller sarsen stones surrounding the mound. The size of the surrounding revetting wall, or peristalith, may have been reduced to facilitate cultivation, perhaps as early as during the Iron Age. Evidence from a recent evaluation suggests that the monument did not occupy one end of an elongated mound in the manner exemplified at Kit's Coty House, and that no flanking ditches accompanied this monument. The railings which delineate the Guardianship area and the information board are both excluded from the scheduling of this monument.

MAP EXTRACT The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

12771

Legacy System:

RSM

Sources

Books and journals
Stukeley, W, Itinerarium Curiosum, (1766)

Other
Hey, G and Lambrick, G, Report of evaluation around Little Kit's Coty House, 1989, Unpublished, copy on file
Darvill, T, MPP Single Monument Class Descriptions - Long Barrows, (1988)

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