Somewhere on a golf course in County Kildare, beneath the whins and furze, there are at least twelve ancient burial mounds that most players drive straight past without knowing. Ring barrows are among the more modest expressions of prehistoric funerary practice: low circular earthworks, each defined by a shallow outer ditch and a slight enclosing bank, built to mark a burial or a place of ritual significance. The examples on the Kildare Golf Course, at the north-western edge of the Little Curragh, are modest even by those standards, their banks rising barely ten centimetres and their enclosing ditches only five to ten centimetres deep, with estimated diameters ranging from roughly six to ten metres across.

The group first came to wider attention through aerial photography. A 1970 photograph, catalogued as CUCAP BDU 21, showed up to twelve small circular enclosures clustered to the south and south-east of a larger enclosure nearby, and a second aerial image, possibly from the Geological Survey of Ireland, made the features still clearer. When a field survey was carried out in 1989, the monuments were already difficult to read on the ground, obscured by tree and furze stumps and disturbed by sheep. By the time more recent attention turned to the site, the area had become almost completely overgrown with whins, and the twelve designated monuments are no longer visible at ground level at all. There is an additional layer of uncertainty: some of what the aerial photographs record may not be burial monuments at all, but lunging rings, the small circular enclosures used historically for exercising horses on a long rein, which are a natural feature of Curragh landscape given its long association with racing and equestrian activity. The Curragh has been connected with horses since at least the early medieval period, and distinguishing ancient earthworks from the traces of more recent equestrian use adds a particular complication to interpreting what lies here.