KIT'S COTY

We looked everywhere to find Kit's Coty.  First we found the picnic area on Blue Bell Hill with it's eager dogs belting out of hatchbacks. A heavily-faded map, sweating behind a plastic glass frame seemed to indicate we were nearby. We then stumbled upon the brasserie which had borrowed it's name and seemingly all signposts, a couple in a flagged-down car had only heard of said restaurant so that lead went cold. After stumbling down steep paths to nowhere and traversing a dangerous triangle of speeding traffic, chalk quarries and the muddied pathways of North Downs walkers, we struck up a hopeful track until an unmistakable stack of sarsen stones huddled over the horizon. Dating from around 3500 BC, Kit's Coty is the most impressive of the Medway Megaliths and a very rare example of a dolmen for the South East. Now only the burial entrance remains of the neolithic long barrow, the rest having been ploughed up and dumped on the periphery of the field. However the colossal capstone and engraved uprights are pockmarked with time and blasted with much grandeur, making the protective railings which surround it more of a cage to contain it. Some graffiti on the centre stone informs us that "Tim HEARTS Chloe", although she is "smelly" according to an additional witness. Kit's Coty derives it's name from the Ancient British for "tomb in the forest", once it held it's secrets in the chequered shade, now it shirks in the open farmland, waiting to be released.