A field in Beaconstown, Co. Kildare, looks unremarkable from the ground. But from the air, a different picture emerges entirely. An aerial photograph taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography reveals the ghostly outlines of what appear to be five small ring-barrows clustered together, none of them much more than fifteen metres across, their circular forms visible only as cropmarks, the subtle variations in plant growth that betray buried features beneath the soil.

Ring-barrows and ring-ditches are among the quieter remnants of prehistoric funerary practice. A ring-ditch is essentially the surviving trace of a circular ditch, or fosse, that once enclosed a burial mound; where the mound itself has been ploughed flat over the centuries, the ditch alone remains, legible only from above when dry conditions cause crops above the filled ditch to grow taller or ripen at a different rate than those over undisturbed ground. At Beaconstown, five such features appear in close proximity, suggesting this was once a place of some significance as a burial landscape, perhaps used over a long period. Alongside them, the same aerial photograph records the cropmark of what is probably a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, hinting that people continued to live and work in this immediate area long after the original burials were made.