page_title: Addington Long Barrow
section_title: Antiquarian and archaeological investigation
hierarchical_section_title: Addington Long Barrow / Antiquarian and archaeological investigation
caption_attribution_description: English: Addington Long Barrow, one of the Medway Megaliths, in the village of Addington, Kent. The barrow is cut in half by a modern road. This photo is of the portion to the north of the road, which incorporates most of the sarstens.
context_page_description: Addington Long Barrow is a chambered long barrow located near the village of Addington in the southeastern English county of Kent. Probably constructed in the fourth millennium BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period, today it survives only in a ruined state. Built of earth and about fifty local sarsen megaliths, the long barrow consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus enclosed by kerb-stones. Collapsed stones on the northeastern end of the chamber probably once formed a stone chamber in which human remains might have been deposited, though none have been discovered.
  Archaeologists have established that the monument was built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe. Although representing part of an architectural tradition of long barrow building that was widespread across Neolithic Europe, Addington Long Barrow belongs to a localised regional variant of barrows produced in the vicinity of the River Medway, now known as the Medway Megaliths. Of these, it lies near to both Chestnuts Long Barrow and Coldrum Long Barrow on the western side of the river.
context_section_description: The antiquarian John Harris mentioned Addington Long Barow in his History of Kent, published posthumously in 1719. He noted that the area where the barrow stood was known locally as "the Warren", and that an "old clerk" informed him that an oak tree had formerly grown in the centre of the stones. The monument was next recorded by the antiquarian Josiah Colebrooke in a short article for Archaeologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of London, in 1773. Aided by the minister of the parish, the Reverend Buttonshaw, Colebooke enquired among elderly locals as to whether they knew of the oak tree mentioned by Harris, but none had. Colebrooke believed that the Britons had retreated to near Addington after their defeat at the fifth-century Battle of Aylesford, and that it was here that they buried their military leader, Categern. The later archaeologist John H. Evans described Colebrooke's descriptions and drawings as "almost completely worthless" because the antiquarian mistook the rectangular chambered tomb for a stone circle. Colebrook's analysis was echoed in the 18th-century writings of Samuel Pegge, Edward Hasted, and John Thorpe.
  In 1827, the road passing through the tomb was widened and deepened. To achieve this, workmen removed two of the sarsens from the revetment kerb and placed them in the corner of the wood to the south of the monument. In the early 1840s, the Reverend Beale Post conducted investigations into the Medway Megaliths, writing them up in a manuscript that was left unpublished; this included Addington Long Barrow and Chestnuts Long Barrow, which he collectively labelled the "Addington Circles". Thomas Wright recorded that in 1845 a local parson, the Reverend Lambert Blackwell Larking, dug into a chamber at Addington, discovering "fragments of rude pottery". From the context in which Wright wrote, it seems that Addington Long Barrow is referred to, although it remains possible that Chestnuts was the barrow in question. In the early 1860s, Charles Roach Smith visited the site alongside Charles Warne and Charles Moore Jessop, the latter of whom described it as a "Celtic" monument in a subsequent article for Gentleman's Magazine.
  In 1871, Edwin Dunkin published a basic plan of the monument, noting that there were similar chambered tombs around Britain. In 1880, the archaeologist Flinders Petrie included the Addington stones in his list of Kentish earthworks; he commented that "with extraordinary perversity [they] have been hitherto described as forming a circle, though they appear to be very plainly in two lines". He published a small, basic plan of the monument. The barrow then received a mention in George Payne's Collectanea Cantiana, published in 1893. Payne noted a folk tradition that stone avenues connected Coldrum to the Addington Long Barrow, although he commented that he was unable to discover any evidence of this feature. The earliest published photographs of the monument, taken by George Clinch, appeared in a 1908 volume of the Victoria County History series. In his 1924 publication dealing with Kent, the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford, then working as the archaeological officer for the Ordnance Survey, listed the Addington Long Barrow alongside the other Medway Megaliths.
  Ronald Jessup included the Addington site in his 1970 book, South East England, there describing it as "mostly overgrown". In 1981, members of the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit conducted a measured survey of the monument. In 2005, Ashbee noted that he had found evidence of recent metal detectoring activity at the site. In May 2007, the archaeologist Brian Philp was conducting his regular inspection of the monument when the current landowner pointed out to him an area where the road was subsiding. Philp alerted Kent County Council, who arranged for contractors to investigate the reason for the subsidence, which proved to be decades of rabbit burrowing beneath the tarmac. Archaeologists from Kent Archaeological Unit visited the site during the work, discovering a buried sarsen. Comparison with older records revealed that
caption: Stones from the chamber of the Addington Long Barrow
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