On the open grassland of the Curragh in Co. Kildare, a series of barely-there earthworks traces a gently curving line across a south-facing slope. Individually, each mound is easy to dismiss as a minor irregularity in the ground; together, they form something more deliberate. Nine possible barrows, with two further outliers at either end, extend roughly 80 metres along a northwest-to-southeast alignment, the whole arrangement just visible enough to suggest intention without giving much else away.

Barrows are prehistoric burial mounds, and the ditch variety, sometimes called a ditch barrow, is defined by the shallow fosse, or encircling ditch, that surrounds the central mound. Here, those fosses survive only as faint traces about a metre wide, and the mounds themselves are remarkably modest: circular and flat-topped, with base diameters ranging from around 4.9 to 6.2 metres, upper surfaces between 2.8 and 3.4 metres across, and a height of no more than 10 to 20 centimetres. Only the most southerly of the nine main mounds lacks any trace of a fosse. The group is not evenly spaced either, with gaps between individual mounds varying from as little as 2 metres to as much as 20 metres, a irregularity that adds to the quiet puzzle of the site. The grouping was identified from aerial photography taken by the Department of Defence in 1999, which is often how such low-lying earthworks come to light at all, their forms more legible from above than from ground level.