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The Black Prince's Barrow
An unnamed prince, a lost battle, and a stone chamber.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Stone burial chamber on a bank with fallen sarsens
- Legend from
- Folk belief recorded by Evans (1946)
- Tone
- Curious
At Coldrum, the old story says a Black Prince lies in the stone chamber, buried where his battle was lost.
Coldrum is a ruined Neolithic long barrow on the edge of the North Downs, with its stone chamber standing on a bank surrounded by fallen sarsens. The archaeologist John Evans recorded in 1946 that local people believed a battle had been fought here and that a 'Black Prince' was buried in the chamber. The countless-stones belief was told here too, and a nineteenth-century tradition claimed that stone avenues once linked the Medway megaliths. Evans suspected the battle stories had not grown up among villagers at all, but had trickled down from antiquaries' theories about Saxon fights in the Medway valley.
One sourceOnly one written account of this legend has been found so far.