An excavation of the barrow was carried out by Lord Weymouth and Heneage Finch—later the 5th Earl of Winchelsea—in 1702 at the instigation of Thomas Thynne, 1st Viscount Weymouth, both of whom had antiquarian interests. Finch dug a shaft 1.5 metres (5 feet) in diameter through the middle of the mound and then expanded it into a 4.8 metre (16 foot) trench along the barrow's length. He found a few bones he regarded as non-human and described a chalk cap covering core of dark earth within the barrow. In a letter Finch wrote to John Battely, the Archdeacon of Canterbury, shortly after the excavation, he noted that: "that it has been a burial-place is manifest, but of what people or time I find no marks." It was later noted that this was one of the earliest organised "barrow openings" to take place in England. Later excavation in the 1930s found surface-evidence of a cross-trench in the heart of a barrow; this may be evidence for another, un-documented excavation that had taken place, perhaps conducted by a member of the Wildman family who owned the Chilham Castle estate between 1792 and 1861.