Mound, Curragh, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Curragh, Co. Kildare

On the open grassland of the Curragh in County Kildare, a low oval mound sits quietly at the northern foot of a gentle rise, easy to walk past without a second glance. It is grass-covered, measuring roughly 14.7 metres east to west at its base and no more than 0.6 metres at its highest point, giving it the appearance of a slight swelling in the ground rather than anything that announces itself as ancient or deliberate. Yet its proportions and placement suggest it is anything but accidental.

The mound sits approximately 65 metres to the north-west of a larger earthen mound that occupies the summit of the same low rise, and the two features appear to form a related pair. Earthen mounds of this kind on the Irish landscape are often funerary or ceremonial in origin, though without excavation it is difficult to say more with certainty about this particular example. What is known is that it was identified through aerial photography carried out by the Department of Defence in 1999, a method that has brought many such subtle features to light across the Irish midlands, where low relief and open ground make cropmarks and surface anomalies easier to detect from the air. The Curragh itself, a broad expanse of unfenced limestone grassland, has been a place of human activity for millennia, which makes the presence of prehistoric earthworks there entirely consistent with the wider landscape.

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