Built out of earth and at least five local sarsen megaliths, the long barrow consisted of a roughly rectangular earthen tumulus with a stone chamber in its eastern end.

By the early 19th century it was buried beneath soil, largely due to millennia of hillwash coming down from the adjacent Blue Bell Hill.

In 1822, it was discovered by farm labourers ploughing the land; the local antiquarians Clement Smythe and Thomas Charles were called in to examine it.

Smythe's Megalith was located on the south-facing combe of Blue Bell Hill, within the vicinity of Warren Farm, near the village of Aylesford in the south-eastern English county of Kent.

[3] This came about through contact with continental European 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.

[4] The region of modern Kent would have been key 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.

[7] 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 amygdaloideae.

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

[13] 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;[14] the architectural tradition was introduced to Britain from continental Europe in the first half of the fourth millennium BCE.

[16] Although now all ruined and not retaining their original appearance,[17] 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.

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

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

[48] At the time of the site's discovery, there was no apparent barrow, in part because the ground level of the area had been raised by millennia of hillwash coming down from further up Blue Bell Hill.

[49] However, as a result of what is known of this architectural style from better-recorded sites, it is apparent that this stone chamber would have been located at the eastern end of a long earthen barrow.

[55] A smaller, circular building approximately 3.75 metres (12 ft) in diameter was present just to the south-east of the longhouse;[56] there was little dating evidence for this, but what existed suggested a Late Neolithic origin.

[59] The archaeologists who investigated the site believed that this material was not just domestic refuse but had been deposited with greater meaning as part of a ritualistic act.

[60] Ashbee suggested that the chambered long barrow may have remained visible into the Middle Ages, and at this point may have been damaged by individuals digging into it.

[64] Ashbee suggested that this destruction was probably due to iconoclasm, believing that the burial of the stones likely indicated that medieval Christian zealots had tried to deliberately destroy and defame the pre-Christian monument.

[66] Supporting this idea is comparative evidence, with the Close Roll of 1237 ordering the opening of barrows on the Isle of Wight in search for treasure, a practice that may have spread to Kent around the same time.

[64] Alexander believed that the destruction may have been brought about by a special commissioner, highlighting that the "expertness and thoroughness of the robbery"—as evidenced at Chestnuts—would have necessitated resources beyond that which a local community could likely produce.

[70] The following day, the workmen returned to the site, where they dug deeper and revealed a flat stone on which the human remains were found; Smythe was not present on this occasion.

[71] The latter also featured some brief discussion as to who the deceased individuals in the chamber had been, speculating that it was "some chief slain in the battle fought here between Vortimer, King of Britain, and the Saxons".

[75] Evans noted that "meagre and incomplete as it is", "we must be grateful" for this document "when we remember the unrecorded destruction wrought throughout the centuries upon this interesting and isolated megalithic necropolis".

[79] He noted that the destruction of prehistoric monuments during this "age of agricultural development" would have been quite commonplace and thus these antiquarians' records—written "almost half a century before the emergence of the outlines of present-day prehistory" as a field of scholarly study—were particularly important.