Barrow (Ditch barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

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Barrow (Ditch barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

Somewhere beneath the open grassland of the Curragh, a prehistoric burial monument survives in a form so subtle that it is barely perceptible at ground level. This is a ditch barrow, a type of funerary monument in which a roughly circular area is enclosed not by a raised mound but by a shallow surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, sometimes accompanied by a low earthen scarp. The result is an enclosure defined more by absence than by presence, the land scooped gently rather than heaped up, and easy to overlook entirely unless you know what you are looking for.

The monument sits on a low, narrow ridge running east to west. Its roughly circular outline measures approximately 9.4 metres across from east to west and 8.5 metres from north to south. Along its south-west to north-west arc, a very faint fosse survives, around 1.5 metres wide and just 0.2 metres deep, the kind of feature that centuries of grazing, weather, and ground disturbance can reduce almost to nothing. Elsewhere around the perimeter, a low scarp between 0.2 and 0.4 metres in height marks the boundary. The monument came to light, or rather was confirmed, through an aerial photograph taken by the Department of Defence in 1999, which revealed the sub-circular outline from above in a way that would be impossible to discern on foot.

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Pete F
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