In a field of level tillage near Kilgowan in County Kildare, two ancient burial monuments lie almost entirely invisible to anyone walking the ground. They survive not as earthen mounds or standing stones but as cropmarks, the faint signatures that buried features leave on growing crops during dry summers, when soil above a filled ditch retains more moisture and the vegetation above it stays greener a little longer. It is a way of seeing the past that depends entirely on altitude and the right season.

The two features are classified as ditch-barrows, a type of prehistoric funerary monument, sometimes called a ringbarrow, defined by a circular ditch or fosse rather than a raised mound at its centre. The north-eastern example at Kilgowan sits approximately 20 metres from a second barrow to its south-west, and together they form a small prehistoric cemetery. The pair were first identified from a 1969 aerial photograph, which captured the cropmark of the south-western barrow as a fosse enclosing a circular area of roughly 14 metres in internal diameter. A Google Earth image from June 2018 confirmed both circular features are still legible from above, their outlines preserved in the soil long after any surface trace has been ploughed away.