Kits Coty is a neolithic tomb in the Medway river valley in Kent dating from around 4,000BC, over a thousand years before Stonehenge was even started. This was the very earliest stages of the Neolithic, when Britain was transitioning from hunter-gathering to agriculture, spurred on by the arrival of farmers from the Mediterranean bringing the techniques over. Modern Europeans are descended from a mix of the original Hunter-Gatherers (such as Cheddar Man), these Neolithic Farmers and the Yamnaya nomads who arrived later from the east and brought the Indo-European languages with them.
Stone circles are having a moment lately, and I have very mixed feeling about it. In one way it’s nice that something I’m interested in has more material available and new people getting interested, but a lot of the online interest is just shallow bandwagon-jumping, with little interest in actually learning anything about the topic. Get an instagram selfie of yourself posing at the stone circle, don’t actually learn anything about history. I think the thing that winds me up the most is when people talk about the Celts “building” the megaliths of the UK. The Celts arrived thousands of years later, and modern DNA research is finding that they almost totally replaced the Neolithic Farmers after a pneumonic plague pandemic. There were no Druids here, and wouldn’t be for a good two thousand years or so. I wonder what the next fad will be.
Today the tombs stand in an open field, but when they were originally built, Britain was still heavily forested. They were also one of the largest constructions in the region for a long time. The giant barrow itself is long smoothed out by centuries of farming at this point, and one of the stones from the other end is gone, but the standing stones themselves remain, and were one of the first monuments to be legally protected in the UK. Samuel Pepys described it as “certainly it is a thing of great antiquity, and I am mightily glad to see it”. They don’t really know what’s inside the tomb chamber, as it’s never been fully excavated. There isn’t really a visitor’s centre or anything, just a railing around them to stop vandalism, and you need a car to get to the obscure location. The last time I went there was in 2011.
There was already a monolith of hedge being created on my way out of the house.
We then drove down the motorway to get to Kits Coty, which involved a few long detours via Medway and Maidstone when we were close, as the specific slip-road is hard to find. There’s no visitor’s centre or tourist signage, and you have to park down a lane at the back of a petrol station that seems to be a dogging area for truck drivers. We had a few weird interactions with people.
A cold wet field of chalk and clay in the Medway river valley in mid November. We joked that we were doing it all wrong to get stone circle clout, and should come back in the summer and make sure to be photographed with exactly the right cool people.
The plants are also a vortex.
If your foot fits inside, you are the One True King of England.
Burrs on my coat.
There was a long lane between the fields.
I think few people come here in the winter.
At last we’re at the right field.
Autumn was very late this year, the leaves had only just started dropping.
And here it is, the six thousand year old megalith itself. The barrow would have stretched out in front of you. We saw no barrow-wights, but it was pretty cold, so they probably stayed indoors in the warm.
1-0 to nature vs fence
Coming back out we discovered there was a much easier route than trudging through the field of mud, it just wasn’t signposted anywhere.
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