Kit's Coty House
Kit's Coty House is just South of Blue Bell Hill,and is one of a group of stones in the area known as the Medway Megaliths.
It consists of three sarsen stones supporting a horizontal capstone with a total height of almost 3m. This would have been at one end of a 70m earthern long barrow oriented east-west. A further stone at the site known as the General's Stone or General's Tomb was destroyed in 1867 and may have come from the chamber.
In 1885, Kit's Coty was one of the first sites in Britain to become a Scheduled Ancient Monument and the iron railings that surround it were added a few years later at the suggestion of Augustus Pitt Rivers. As only the megalithic portion of the barrow was fenced in by the railings, the long earth barrow has been continually ploughed away since, with uncovered stones dumped in woodland nearby by the farmer and the mound itself, still visible in the mid-twentieth century, now gone.
Samuel Pepys wrote about the stones in the seventeenth century when he described them as " Three great stones standing upright and a great round one lying on them, of great bigness, although not so big as those on Salisbury Plain. But certainly it is a thing of great antiquity and I am mightily glad to have seen it". Hilaire Belloc in his classic description of what became known as the Pilgrims' Way linked the history of the ancient trackway with that of Kits Coty when he wrote " the overwhelming age of the way we had come was gathered up in that hackneyed place" . It is believed that the ancient trackway itself originally went to Salisbury Plain. Robert Vermaat suggests that the name Kits Coty is derived from 'Coty' meaning 'house' and that 'Kit' comes form the name 'Catigern' who fought Hengist and Horsa here in 455AD.
Little Kit's Coty House
Little Kit's Coty House lies 200 metres to the south of Kits Coty. These are the remains of a ruined prehistoric long barrow burial chamber. This group of stones has become known as the countless stones because it is said that no two people can count them and come up with the same answer. The countless stones are made of the same sarsen stone as Kit's Coty House.