A field in Beaconstown, County Kildare, looks unremarkable from the ground. From the air, however, the grass and crops tell a different story. Subtle variations in colour and growth rate, known as cropmarks, trace the outlines of what are probably five small ring-barrows or ring-ditches clustered together, each defined by the ghost of a fosse, a circular or near-circular ditch cut into the earth by people who lived here long before any written record of the place. At an estimated maximum diameter of around fifteen metres apiece, these are not large monuments, but their grouping is what catches the eye.

Ring-barrows are low burial mounds of prehistoric origin, typically enclosed by one or more ditches, and they often appear in clusters where a community returned to the same patch of ground across generations to inter their dead. The five examples at Beaconstown were identified from a single aerial photograph, catalogued as CUCAP ASU 65, which captured the cropmark evidence in sufficient detail to distinguish the individual fosses. What makes the site still more interesting is that a probable ringfort, a circular enclosed settlement of early medieval date, appears immediately adjacent. The proximity of a later habitation site to what may be a prehistoric burial ground is not unusual in the Irish landscape; early medieval farmers likely knew these older earthworks were there and may well have chosen their location with that knowledge in mind.