Barrow, Curragh, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Barrows

Barrow, Curragh, Co. Kildare

On the open grassland of the Curragh in County Kildare, a small circular mound sits almost invisibly in the landscape, its presence more legible from the air than from the ground. The feature measures roughly seven metres in diameter and is enclosed by a shallow fosse, the term for the ditch that typically surrounds a burial mound or barrow, scooped from the earth to define and perhaps to demarcate the space within. At that scale it is easy to miss entirely, the kind of thing a walker might cross without registering.

The site was identified through aerial photography, including the Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophoto coverage from 1995, and is also visible on Google Earth imagery. The detail comes from a personal communication by Colm Chambers in August 2013. Beyond what the aerial record shows, a slightly raised central area and its enclosing ditch, little else is documented. The Curragh itself is one of the more archaeologically layered stretches of open ground in Ireland, a limestone plain whose thin soils and centuries of grazing have preserved surface features that might otherwise have been ploughed away. Barrows of this kind are generally understood as prehistoric funerary monuments, though the term covers a wide range of forms and periods, and without excavation or further survey it is not possible to say more about the date or purpose of this particular example.

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