Coldrum Long Barrow: Nearly 6,000 Years Old, and Someone Tried to Bury It

Day 6 of 15. Yesterday's story was a 190-year-old paper trail under a modern hospital car park. Today's is a different order of old entirely: Coldrum Long Barrow, a chambered Neolithic tomb in a field outside Trottiscliffe, built by some of Britain's first farmers close to 6,000 years ago - millennia before anything else on this list, and before Stonehenge's sarsens went up. It's also, by the archaeological evidence, the only site in this countdown where real violence has left marks on real bones.

Coldrum is one of the Medway Megaliths, a small, scattered group of chambered tombs built along the River Medway as it cuts through the North Downs - the most south-easterly cluster of megalithic monuments anywhere in Britain. It was raised in the Early Neolithic, not long after farming itself reached Britain from continental Europe, by the same pastoralist communities who were just starting to clear the Downs for livestock. Along with the nearby Addington and Chestnuts long barrows, it forms the group's western cluster, and it's generally agreed to be the best-preserved monument of the whole Medway group.

Antiquarians had been describing the stones since the 1840s, but it was the geologist F. J. Bennett who first dug into the tomb properly, on 16 April 1910, finding human bone under just a few inches of chalky soil. Early estimates put the number of burials at 22; a 2013 re-analysis by Michael Wysocki's team revised that down to a minimum of 17 - nine adults, two sub-adults and six children of varying ages. Three of the skulls show signs of violence, with healed and unhealed fractures, and cut-marks on some of the bones point to bodies being deliberately dismembered after death. Bennett himself floated human sacrifice as an explanation; later archaeologists, including John Evans, concluded there's simply no way to know - the cut-marks are just as consistent with excarnation, a known Neolithic practice of exposing or processing a body before its bones were gathered for burial, as with anything more sinister.

Local folklore has its own, much less reliable, version of events: the antiquarian John H. Evans recorded a belief that a battle was once fought at the site, and that a "Black Prince" lies buried in the chamber. We've found no date, no named original source and no corroborating account beyond Evans's note of it - and it doesn't square with what's actually in the ground. The real occupants are Neolithic farmers who died thousands of years before England had princes, black or otherwise. File this one next to the "countless stones" legend attached to other Medway megaliths, which claims you can never count the same number of stones twice: evocative, well-travelled, and not history.

Someone did go to real trouble to damage Coldrum, long after its Neolithic builders were gone. The archaeologist Paul Ashbee has suggested the tomb's kerb-stones were deliberately toppled and buried in the late 13th or early 14th century, plausibly by Christians uneasy about a pagan monument on their doorstep; locals later helped themselves to chalk and stone from the damaged structure for their own building work. There's a second, odder story too: an 1889 account by Payne and Arnold records a long-standing local belief in a secret tunnel running from the tomb to Trottiscliffe church, half a mile away. Decades before that, someone had actually dug into the dolmen's entrance to test the legend, causing a cave-in that badly disturbed the chamber - until the Vicar of Trottiscliffe stepped in and had the digging stopped, worried the stones themselves would come down.

Sir Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons took charge of the human remains recovered in the early 20th-century digs and published his analysis of them in 1913. Some were later reburied in the churchyard of St Peter and St Paul, Trottiscliffe, sometime between 1939 and 1945 - quietly closing the loop on bones that had spent close to 6,000 years in the ground a few hundred yards away, and then several decades more in storage and under a microscope.

Coldrum's stones were given to the National Trust in 1926, dedicated as a memorial to the Kentish prehistorian Benjamin Harrison, and the site has been free to visit, dawn to dusk, ever since - a small National Trust car park on Pinesfield Lane holds ten cars, and there's no charge to walk up and see what's left of the chamber. The National Trust itself describes it as a place that "remains a place of congregation and ritual" - not metaphorically. Every May Day at dawn, the Hartley Morris Men still gather at Coldrum to "sing up the sun" with traditional dances and song, marking the turning of the year at this exact spot in a tradition that, if the site's own builders were doing anything similar, is pushing six thousand years old.

Source: Wikipedia, The Modern Antiquarian, National Trust