Constructed circa 4000 BCE, during the Early Neolithic period of British prehistory, today it survives in a ruined state.

Archaeologists have established that the monument was built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe.

[1] Kit's Coty can be reached on foot along a track that appears at the junction where the Pilgrim's Way and Rochester Road meet.

[4] This came about through contact with continental societies, although it is unclear to what extent this can be attributed to an influx of migrants or to indigenous Mesolithic Britons adopting agricultural technologies from the continent.

[5] The region of modern Kent would have been a key area for the arrival of continental European settlers and visitors, because of its position on the estuary of the River Thames and its proximity to the continent.

[8] Environmental data from the vicinity of the White Horse Stone, a putatively prehistoric monolith near the River Medway, supports the idea that the area was still largely forested in the Early Neolithic, covered by a woodland of oak, ash, hazel/alder and Maloideae.

[9] Throughout most of Britain, there is little evidence of cereal or permanent dwellings from this period, leading archaeologists to believe that the Early Neolithic economy on the island was largely pastoral, relying on herding cattle, with people living a nomadic or semi-nomadic life.

[14] These chambered tombs were built all along the Western European seaboard during the Early Neolithic, from southeastern Spain up to southern Sweden, taking in most of the British Isles;[15] the architectural tradition was introduced to Britain from continental Europe in the first half of the fourth millennium BCE.

[17] Although now all in a ruinous state and not retaining their original appearance,[18] at the time of construction the Medway Megaliths would have been some of the largest and most visually imposing Early Neolithic funerary monuments in Britain.

[31] The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch.

[32] These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles.

[47] In 1946, Evans recorded a local folk tale that held that the chamber at Kit's Coty House was erected by three witches who lived on Blue Bell Hill.

[50] Camden described the monument in greater detail from personal observation in the expanded 1610 English translation of Britannia: under the side of a hill I saw foure, huge, rude, hard stones erected, two for the sides, one transversall in the midest betweene them, and the hugest of all piled and laied over them in manner of the British monument which is called Stone-heng but not so artificially with mortis and tenents.

Verily the unskilfull common people terme it at this day, of the same Catigern, Keiths or Kits Coty house.

[53] The antiquarian John Aubrey made mention of the monument in his unpublished manuscript on British archaeological sites, the Monumenta Britannica.

[citation needed]Stukeley included four engravings of Kit's Coty House in his two volumes of Itinerarium Curiosum.

[43] In c.1783, James Douglas set one of his workmen to dig on the western side of the monument, and produced a watercolour painting illustrating the scene.

[57] In his 1924 publication dealing with Kent, the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford, then working as the archaeological officer for the Ordnance Survey, listed Kit's Coty House alongside the other Medway Megaliths and reprinted one of Stukeley's engravings of it.

[43] Ashbee suggested that Kit's Coty House was "the best known" of the Medway Megaliths,[61] while Champion thought it "perhaps the best-known monument in Kent".