CHAPTER IV.
MINOR ENGLISH ANTIQUITIES.
Aylesford.
The detailed examination of these groups at Avebury and Stonehenge will probably be deemed sufficient to establish at least a primâ facie case in favour of the hypothesis that these monuments were sepulchral—that at least some of them marked battle-fields, and lastly, that their antiquity was not altogether prehistoric. If this is so, it will not be necessary to repeat the same evidence in treating of those monuments or groups we are about to describe. Incidentally the latter will, if I am not mistaken, afford many confirmations of those propositions, but it will not be necessary to insist or enlarge on them to the same extent as has been done in the previous pages.
Among the remaining groups of stones in England, one of the most important is—or rather was—that in front of Aylesford in Kent. The best known member of this group is that known as Kit's Cotty—or Coity-house, which has, however, been so often drawn and described that it is hardly necessary to do much more than refer to it here. It is a dolmen, composed of four stones, three upright; the two side stones being about 8 feet square and 2 in thickness, the third somewhat smaller; these form three sides of a chamber, the fourth side being—and apparently always having been—left open. These three support a cap stone measuring 11 feet by 8 feet. If we can trust Stukeley's drawing,[1] it was an external dolmen standing on the end of a low long barrow. At the other end of the mound lay an obelisk, since removed, but in Stukeley's time it was said to mark "the general's grave." The mound has since been levelled by the
- ↑ 'Iter Curiosum,' pl. xxxiii.
