On a gentle east-facing pasture slope in County Kildare, a small earthen mound sits quietly in the grass, its significance invisible to anyone who does not know what to look for. It is not large, barely a metre high and roughly five metres across, encircled by a shallow fosse, the kind of enclosing ditch commonly found around early medieval earthworks. What makes it unusual is not its shape or dimensions, but the story attached to it, a story that mingles plague, death, and an old Irish ballad in a way that has left a physical mark on the landscape.

Writing in 1906, a commentator named Fitzsymons recorded a local tradition that the mound, referred to as a moat, was raised over the very spot where two bodies in a plague-shed were consumed. The hawthorn trees growing on it were understood to be the same ones mentioned in the Ballad of Oonah More, a piece of vernacular poetry connected to Inch Castle, which stands roughly 250 metres to the north-west. The ballad's precise contents are not elaborated on in the surviving account, but the association between the mound and the song suggests a long local memory of whatever catastrophe, likely one of the many plague outbreaks that periodically swept through medieval Ireland, gave rise to both. The plague-shed itself, a structure built to isolate the sick and the dying away from the main settlement, is now gone; only the mound and the hawthorns remain as physical traces of the event.

The mound is a modest thing by any measure, sub-circular in plan, with a shallow surrounding fosse that survives most clearly to the north-west, north-east, and south-east. The hawthorns Fitzsymons mentioned were still present when the site was recorded, rooted in the same raised ground that local tradition says was built over two plague-dead, more than a century after he noted them.