Barrow (Ditch barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Barrows
Somewhere on the Curragh's south-facing grassland, a loose procession of ancient burial mounds sits so close to the ground that a person could walk straight across them without noticing. These are ditch barrows, a form of low funerary monument in which a circular mound is encircled by a shallow fosse, or ditch, cut into the earth around it. What makes this particular group quietly arresting is the sheer modesty of its presence: the mounds rise no more than twenty centimetres above the surrounding turf, with flat upper surfaces measuring between roughly three and three and a half metres across.
There are nine mounds in the main cluster, arranged in a gently curving line running roughly northwest to southeast across a distance of about eighty metres, with two further outliers extending the group at either end. The individual mounds are small and broadly consistent in form, with basal diameters ranging from just under five metres to a little over six. All but the most southerly retain faint traces of the surrounding fosse, approximately one metre wide. They are not evenly spaced, the gaps between them varying considerably, from as little as two metres to as much as twenty. That irregularity, combined with the slight curve of the overall alignment, gives the group an informal quality, as though they accumulated gradually rather than being laid out to a single plan. The cluster was confirmed through aerial photography in 1999, which allowed the low relief of the mounds to be read against the flat openness of the Curragh plain in a way that ground-level observation alone might easily miss.