Kingston Down Grave 257

This tumulus was nearly twenty feet diameter at its basis; and at least six feet high. It stood in a line with the two large mounds (parallel to the road from Canterbury to Dover, before mentioned); and was the smallest and eastmost of the three. It was situated, also, on the east (or rather, south-east) side of, and close to the road leading from the village of Kingston to Ileden; and, where no vestiges of any other tumuli are now to be discovered; all that side of the said road being ploughed ground. Nothing but the said road, which passes between them, separates the middlemost of these mounds from that which I am now endeavouring to describe. I took great notice of it every time I have dug here; but having been told that Mr. Barrett had dug into it at the time he opened some other of the tumuli [Mr. Barrett, the landowner, in the 1740s opened several tumuli, according to a reference in the introduction to Kingston Down, page 36-37]; and a great hollow still remaining in the top of it, (a plain proof of its having been, or at least, endeavoured to have been opened at some time or other), I had hitherto been discouraged from attacking it in form. Indeed, some of my people, last year, having not much else to do at the time, did by my order open a trench on the south side near the basis of it, where they found some human bones. But these not lying in any regular order, I then fully (and rightly too, as it now appears), concluded that they had been disturbed before. However, looking on this day's work as the last I should have at this place, and being determined to leave as little behind me as possible, I had the whole mound or tumulus thoroughly examined; but my search served only to convince me of what I had before suspected, namely, that it had, at some time or other, been opened before.