Ordnance Survey, listed the Coffin Stone alongside the other Medway Megaliths. In his 1927 book In Kentish Pilgrimland, William Coles Finch included a plate of the Coffin Stone; the photograph featured his son standing on it and shows various broken sarsens piled up at the monument's eastern end. Finch's plate was the first published photograph of the megalith, and was likely also the last published depiction of it before another large sarsen was placed over it. Finch measured the sarsen and found it to be wider than Thorpe had reported, also making note of plough damage and breakages. In a 1946 article on the folklore involving the Medway Megaliths, Evans noted that the Coffin Stone, like several other megalithic features in the area, was associated with a burial following the fifth-century Battle of Aylesford. The idea that one or more of these monuments had been linked to the battle was first mooted by early modern antiquarians, before entering local folklore. Archaeological investigation In 2005, Ashbee noted that he had raised the issue of the site's preservation with English Heritage and that their representative had informed him that they would not consider according it legal protection because they thought it a natural feature. The idea that the stone might have been natural had previously been voiced by the archaeologist Glyn Daniel on his visit to the site. Ashbee commented that "it has, however, for long been manifest that English Heritage is more concerned with commercialisation than affording appropriate protection to our national monuments". Ashbee noted that any evidence for a chambered tomb at the site might be ascertained through geophysics or excavation. Led by the archaeologist Paul Garwood, a programme of field surveys, geophysical research, and excavations took place at the site as part of the Medway Valley Prehistoric Landscapes Project during 2008 and 2009. This found evidence for prehistoric activity in the vicinity of the megalith but was unable to accurately date these archaeological features. The investigators established that there was no evidence that a chambered long barrow had once stood there. They determined that the stone had been moved to its present location at some point in the post-medieval period (1450 to 1600). There was a large hollow in the chalk nearby which was akin to that found by excavators near to the Cuckoo Stone in Wiltshire; the archaeologists interpreted this as an extraction hollow, suggesting that the Coffin