Scattered across a south-facing slope on the Curragh of Kildare, a loose procession of ancient burial mounds sits so low in the ground that most people walking nearby would pass without a second glance. These are ditch barrows, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a small circular mound is encircled by a shallow fosse, or ditch, cut into the surrounding earth. What makes this particular group quietly remarkable is less any individual mound than the arrangement as a whole: eleven possible barrows in total, nine forming a gently curving line roughly eighty metres long on a northwest to southeast axis, with two further outliers at either end of that alignment.

The mounds are modest by any measure. Their bases range from about 4.9 to 6.2 metres across, their flat upper surfaces from 2.8 to 3.4 metres, and none rises more than about twenty centimetres above the surrounding ground. Around most of them, faint traces of a fosse roughly one metre wide can still be detected, though the most southerly mound in the main group appears to lack this defining feature. They are not evenly spaced, with gaps between individual mounds varying considerably, from as little as two metres to as much as twenty. The group came to wider attention through aerial photography carried out in 1999, which allowed the curving linear arrangement to be read clearly from above in a way that ground-level observation alone would not easily permit.

The Curragh is already a landscape dense with prehistoric and early historic activity, a broad open plain of short-grazed limestone grassland that has preserved surface features unusually well over millennia. Walking the area, a careful observer might just make out the subtle ridges of the mounds and, in the right light and conditions, the ghost of a surrounding ditch. The unevenness of the spacing gives the group an organic rather than formally planned quality, as though added to incrementally over time rather than laid out as a single designed ensemble.