On the wide, open grassland of the Curragh in Co. Kildare, a small circular earthwork sits so low in the ground that most people walking past would register nothing unusual at all. The feature in question is a ditch barrow, a prehistoric burial monument type defined by a shallow encircling fosse, essentially a dug trench, rather than the more pronounced mounded profile of a ring-barrow. This particular example is modest even by those understated standards: a slightly raised central platform just 4.5 metres in diameter and barely 0.2 metres above the surrounding ground, enclosed by a fosse only 1.6 metres wide and 0.1 metres deep on its upslope side, tapering elsewhere into a low scarp. It was identified not through ground excavation but through aerial photography carried out by the Department of Defence in 1999, which shows how readily such features can escape notice at ground level.

What makes the site quietly interesting is its position within a much denser prehistoric landscape. Sitting midway down a long, gentle north-facing slope, the barrow is overlooked from roughly 100 metres to the south by two large ring-barrows and two further small ditch barrows. Beyond those, at distances ranging from about 160 to 180 metres to the south-west and west-south-west, lie at least three more possible ditch barrows. The Curragh was clearly used for funerary or ceremonial activity over a sustained period, and this small earthwork, easy to overlook, is one node in what appears to have been a deliberately arranged grouping of monuments spread across the slope.