Something in the grass on the Little Curragh does not quite add up. A slightly raised circle of ground, just 7.4 metres across, is ringed by a fosse so shallow it barely reads as a ditch at all, only 0.2 metres deep and between 1.4 and 1.7 metres wide. A modern footpath cuts straight through it, north to south. And yet this unassuming feature is a ditch-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary or ritual monument defined by a circular enclosing ditch rather than the more familiar mounded earthwork, and it sits at the centre of a quiet concentration of the dead.

The ridge that forms the spine of the Little Curragh carries several of these monuments in close proximity. Within 200 metres of this barrow lie two large ring-barrows and at least three other possible ditch-barrows, with a fourth lying roughly 190 metres to the north-east. Together they suggest that this low, open spine of ground was treated as a significant place over an extended period of prehistoric activity, the flat and treeless character of the Curragh perhaps making it a natural choice for monuments intended to be seen across open ground. The barrow itself was identified through aerial photography taken by the Department of Defence in 1999, a reminder of how much of Ireland's prehistoric landscape only becomes legible from above.

What makes this particular monument stranger still is something no one has fully explained. In the south-east quadrant of the interior, a distinct circular patch of different vegetation growth, about 1.8 metres in diameter, is visible, and six similar circular patches appear immediately outside the monument to the east, south, and west. Their origin and function remain unclear, as does their relationship to the barrow itself. Comparable features, represented there as very shallow depressions rather than vegetation anomalies, occur at another ditch-barrow about 685 metres to the north-west. Whether they reflect buried features, soil disturbance, or something else entirely, no one yet knows.