Somewhere beneath the farmland at Castleroe in County Kildare, five circular ditches lie close together in the soil, invisible to anyone walking the surface but legible from the air as faint cropmarks pressed into the earth. These ring-ditches, the circular trenches that typically surrounded prehistoric burial mounds or ritual enclosures, survive not as earthworks but as traces, the differential growth of crops above soil that was disturbed and refilled long ago giving them away to an aerial camera.

The group of five was identified from an aerial photograph, reference GB89.AG.15, which captured the cropmarks of all the ditches clustered tightly in proximity to one another. Ring-ditches of this kind are generally associated with Bronze Age funerary activity, the ditch being the remnant of a low mound or barrow whose central material has long since been ploughed flat or eroded away. The clustering of five such features at a single location suggests this area may once have formed a small prehistoric cemetery, a type of grouping not uncommon in the Irish midlands and their borderlands, where communities returned to the same ground across generations to bury their dead.