On the Curragh, that great open plain in Co. Kildare long associated with horse racing and military training, the ground holds older business. Scattered across a gentle south-facing slope is a group of low earthen mounds, so modest in scale that a walker might cross them without pause. They are ditch barrows, a form of prehistoric burial monument in which a circular mound is ringed by a shallow fosse, or ditch, cut into the surrounding earth. What makes this particular cluster quietly arresting is not any individual mound but the arrangement of them taken together: a gently curving line, running roughly northwest to southeast, comprising nine possible barrows with two further outliers at either end.

The mounds are small by any measure. Their bases range from about 4.9 to 6.2 metres in diameter, their flat upper surfaces from 2.8 to 3.4 metres across, and their height reaches no more than 0.1 to 0.2 metres above the surrounding ground. Almost all retain faint traces of the encircling fosse, roughly a metre wide, though the most southerly of the nine main examples has lost even that. The group stretches across approximately 80 metres in total, but the spacing between individual mounds is irregular, varying anywhere from 2 to 20 metres, which gives the line an unplanned, almost casual quality. They were identified from aerial photography taken by the Department of Defence in 1999, the kind of overhead view that reveals cropmarks and earthworks invisible at ground level, where the subtle logic of a prehistoric landscape only becomes legible from above.