page_title: Medway Megaliths
section_title: Coffin Stone
hierarchical_section_title: Medway Megaliths / The eastern stones / Coffin Stone
caption_attribution_description: English: The Coffin Stone, in a vineyard near Blue Bell Hill in Kent, England. Sarsten stones possibly moved from a former neolithic burial chamber nearby.
context_page_description: The Medway Megaliths, sometimes termed the Kentish Megaliths, are a group of Early Neolithic chambered long barrows and other megalithic monuments located in the lower valley of the River Medway in Kent, South-East England. Constructed from local sarsen stone and soil between the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, they represent the only known prehistoric megalithic group in eastern England and the most south-easterly group in Britain.
  They remain one of several regionally contained chambered long barrow traditions in Britain, although have certain precise architectural characteristics which mark them out as distinct from other groups.
  The purpose of these long barrows remains elusive, although some were used as tombs for the remains of a select group of individuals. It is also widely believed that they were places where religious rituals were performed. Many archaeologists believe that they reflect the process of Neolithisation of Britain, as hunter-gatherer populations were replaced by pastoralists.
  Three chambered tombs have been identified to the west of the river: the Coldrum Stones, Addington Long Barrow, and Chestnuts Long Barrow.
context_section_description: The Coffin Stone is located about 400 metres north-west of Little Kits Coty House, and is also around 250 metres away from the Pilgrims Way.
  The Coffin Stone is a rectangular sarsen measuring about 4.40m by 2.80m, and is at least 50 cm thick. Archaeologists Brian Philp and Mike Dutto thought that this stone marked the chamber of a chambered long-barrow, noting that an outline of a mound could be seen. They highlighted that two smaller stones exist nearby, and that another sarsen was also located close by; in 1980, a farmer shifted that latter stone atop the Coffin Stone, where it still resides.
  The monument's existence was noted in Stukeley's 1776 Itinerarium Curiosum. In the 1840s, an antiquary and Druid from Maidstone, Beal Poste, published an account in which he asserted that a sack full of human bones were found in the vicinity of the Stone during the 1830s. A slightly different account was provided by Edwin Dunkin in 1871; he asserted that a hedge had been removed in 1836, revealing the stone along with two human skulls, several bones, and charcoal, although he did not state the provenance of this account.
  In 2008 and 2009, a team led by Garwood's team excavated at the site, revealing that the sarsen had only been placed in its current position during the Post-Medieval period (c.1450–1600), and thus was not the fallen orthostat of a chambered tomb as had previously been believed.
   Garwood nevertheless suggested that it might have been erected as a monolith during later prehistory, as evidence citing a large hollow in the chalk adjacent to the stone, which he asserted had similarities with the extraction hollows of the Cuckoo Stone and Torstone discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project.
caption: The Coffin Stone, in a vineyard
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