Barrow (Ring Barrow), Brewel, Co. Kildare

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Brewel, Co. Kildare

Somewhere on the north-eastern slope of Brewel Hill in County Kildare, a Bronze Age ring barrow sits beneath a front garden, largely invisible to anyone who might walk past it today. A ring barrow is a burial monument, typically consisting of a central mound or flat area enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. This one was never recorded on Ordnance Survey maps, yet aerial photographs taken in 1963 and 1969 show it clearly: a raised circular area enclosed by a broad fosse and outer bank, with an estimated overall diameter of around 48 metres. It is one of at least four such monuments clustered on and around Brewel Hill, the nearest lying roughly 120 metres to the west-southwest.

By 1985, the monument had become almost imperceptible at ground level. What could still be made out was a circular area of roughly 17 metres in diameter, enclosed by a broad, shallow fosse. Local information collected at the time indicated that the land had recently been "improved", a term that, in this context, likely refers to agricultural levelling or ground clearance of the kind that has quietly erased so many earthworks across Ireland. The situation deteriorated further by 1994, when archaeological trial trenching was carried out in advance of building a private dwelling house just to the south-west of the site. A report by Opie and Keeley-Schmidt, filed under Excavation Licence No. 94E029, noted that no visible surface trace of the monument survived at that point. The monument itself was not among the areas trenched, however, and subsurface deposits may still lie intact beneath the soil.

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