Somewhere on the flat expanse of the Little Curragh in County Kildare, a circular patch of grass quietly marks an ancient burial. It is barely perceptible at ground level: a very slightly raised area, roughly five metres across, encircled by a shallow ditch so subtle that it registers as little more than a change in vegetation. That narrow band of different growth is, in fact, the defining feature of a ditch barrow, a type of low funerary mound in which the enclosing fosse, rather than a large earthen mound, is the primary structural element. Here, the ditch is between one and one point seven metres wide and only about five centimetres deep, making it virtually invisible to a casual walker but clearly legible from the air.

The monument came to wider attention through aerial photography carried out by the Department of Defence in 1999, which revealed the vegetation cropmark ringing the central area with unexpected clarity. What makes the find more significant is that this barrow does not stand alone. It belongs to a cluster of six closely associated monuments in this corner of the Little Curragh, a group recorded together and presumed to relate to one another in function or date. The Curragh is already well known for its long association with military activity and horse racing, but its flat, largely undisturbed grassland has also preserved traces of prehistoric landscape use that more intensively farmed ground would long since have erased. Ditch barrows of this kind are generally associated with the Bronze Age or Iron Age, periods when communities across Ireland marked burial places with earthen enclosures of varying elaboration, from large prominent mounds to these almost imperceptible rings.