Barrow, Kilmurry, Co. Kildare

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Barrow, Kilmurry, Co. Kildare

In a field near Kilmurry in County Kildare, the ground itself holds a secret that is invisible at eye level but legible from the air. A cropmark, the kind of faint patterning that appears in aerial photographs when buried features affect the growth of grass or grain above them, reveals a roughly circular form about 23 metres in diameter. Inside it, a second, smaller circle of approximately 9 metres across is just discernible. Together, they sketch out the ghost of something much older.

The inner enclosure is the telling detail. A simple circular cropmark might indicate any number of things, but the presence of a concentric inner ring points toward a ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument in which a central mound, long since flattened by centuries of ploughing, was originally enclosed within a surrounding bank or ditch. Ring-barrows are found across Ireland and Britain and belong broadly to the Bronze Age, though they were used and reused across long periods. The Kilmurry example appears to have been levelled entirely, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. It came to attention through aerial imagery captured on 28 June 2018, when crop or soil conditions happened to make the buried outline legible from above in a way that ground-level inspection would never reveal.

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Pete F
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