Coldrum - A brief history

The Coldrum Stones are sited on a small lynchet that runs, down from the Pilgrims Way, in the shadow of the North Downs, Kent. The monument is dated to the early Neolithic period c. 4000 BCE, and unlike most megalithic long barrows is more square than elongated in shape.

The lynchet that Coldrum sits is much older than the monument itself. The feature is evidence that the landscape before Coldrum’s construction was agricultural based, and would have been many decades, even centuries old before Coldrum was planned and built. Coldrum sits at a slight angle into the lynchet and standing within the chamber or on top of the mound you are confounded with a fantastic view across the flat Medway Valley, onto the rising North Downs, which carry on running south down to Dover. The casual observer will only note the view, those with some understanding of the landscape and other monuments would soon realise something else. With the aid of the naked eye, on a clear day you can make out the field and even the shadow of the other famous megalith in the area, that of Kits Coty. People of the Neolithic loved what Archaeologist term ‘Intersight visibility’, i.e. you can see one monument from other monuments over very long distances. This leads into another fantastic discussion better left for another time.

Over the later part of the 19th Century and earlier 20th Century, many excavations, both recorded and unrecorded were carried out on the barrow and its chamber. In 1910 excavations of the chamber revealed the remains of human bone; Analysis of the bone indicated that at least twenty-two individuals were interred in the chamber in the Neolithic period. Later excavations post World War One led to further discoveries of human remains, however their safe storage in London were their ultimate downfall as the site was bombed during the blitz and all was lost. Of the twenty-two individuals that are known of at Coldrum, one of them is well worth noting upon. Of the nine skulls that came for the 1910 excavation, a female skull has caused great excitement amongst modern archaeologist studying the bones of our ancestors. The evidence of the skull indicates the female was murdered. A large fracture in the skull, possible coursed by a flint/stone axe was the cause of this women’s death. Murder or sacrifice, we will probably never know. This type of violent death is not uncommon, and is known to have existed from the Mesolithic to Bronze Age period.

The barrow itself is made up of at least 50 stones. These are mostly rectangular or triangular in shape. Although today it is easy to see the stones marking the limits of the barrow, in yester-year, archaeologists believed the stones to mark the limits of a prehistoric stone circle. There is evidence on one stone at least, possibly a second, that the stone/s were used way before the construction of the monument for the polishing of flint and stone axes. One of my own Neolithic flint axes discovered not to far from Coldrum fits nicely into the groove. Polishing stones, as they are referred to, may well be a common feature of many long barrows, remaining to be discovered. The West Kennet long barrow has at least one polishing stone used in its make up. The polishing stone at Coldrum would have been well out of reach, or at least covered over with the barrow mound once constructed. This may well mean that the polishing stone carried great importance to be incorporated into the barrow construction.

The capstone no longer remains on the chamber; it is either one of the large stones or many of the smaller stones that reside at the bottom of the barrow in front of the chamber. This is also true for the portal stone or door to the chamber. Such a piece of chamber architecture would very useful in understanding more about our ancestors use and ritual beliefs at these monuments. For instance, did the portal stone only measure ¾ of the height of the chamber ‘door frame’; this would therefore leave a small rectangular hole in the top of the door. Light would be able to stream into the barrow with the early morning sunrise, perhaps more importantly it would allow the spirits of the ancestors to freely move in and out of the chamber. On the other side did the portal stone cover all the of the chamber ‘door frame’ and in effect lock the ancestors bones and perhaps spirits inside the mound and therefore underworld! Being a portal stone, it would be moved to allow the newly dead in, to remove bones for other rituals or let the spirits out at important dates in the year.

The reconstruction board at Coldrum displays the barrow as it possibly once stood, and I don’t think that it is far off from ‘archaeological fact’. The only changes that I would make to it would be the removal of the lovely short grass growing over the mound, to be replaced with chalk. With a lot of the landscape around Coldrum and the Medway valley being deforested at this time, as well as other Neolithic landscapes across the country, a green mound set in green fields doesn’t help the monument stick out. As we have seen the people of the Neolithic liked the ideas of intersight visibility, therefore as with other Neolithic monuments, henges and long barrows, a shining white mound in the middle of a treeless landscape is going to make a statement. What that statement was we can only guess at.

Less than a kilometre south of the Coldrum Stones are two further Neolithic monuments, that of the Chestnuts, quite like Coldrum in its form and the Addington long barrow which takes the form of more conventional long barrows of the time. These two monuments are unlike Coldrum and are aligned to the solstices. The path that leads between the barrows has a number of large stones dotted along it, this has fuelled speculation that an ancient processional way linked the three monuments together, but this would not have been perhaps in the format of an avenue of stones, such as at Avebury.

The National Trust bought the monument in 1935 and have been the legal guardians of the site ever since. Coldrum still draws in the crowds, come Solstice, May Day or late summer evenings. Most leave the site as they find it, other don’t, harming both the spirit and physical beauty of the site. A National Trust car park is located about 10 minutes walk from the barrow and shows off much of the North Downs area of outstanding beauty and rolling landscape that the our ancestors would have walked.

Simon Miles
Greenwood Grove