On the wide, open grassland of the Curragh in County Kildare, a patch of slightly different vegetation betrays something older than the racehorses and military barracks that now define the plain. A small circular rise, roughly nine metres across, sits on a gently south-facing slope, almost entirely swallowed by overgrowth. Ringing it is a band of denser vegetation, one to one and a half metres wide, that likely marks the line of a back-filled fosse, the encircling ditch that originally defined this as a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument in which a low earthen mound is surrounded by a cut ditch.

The Curragh itself has a long archaeological biography that predates its association with horse racing by several millennia, and features like this one are easily missed against the cropped grassland of the plain. A ditch barrow of this modest scale would typically belong to the Bronze Age, when such round mounds served as burial monuments for individuals or small groups, often marked out from the surrounding landscape by their enclosing ditches. Here, that ditch has long since been filled in, whether deliberately or through centuries of gradual silting, leaving only the ghost of a ring readable in the way the grass and scrub have taken hold differently above disturbed ground. The site was recorded by Gearóid Conroy.