Barrow, Kitchenstown, Co. Dublin

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Barrows

Barrow, Kitchenstown, Co. Dublin

A flat-topped circular mound sitting quietly in a grazed field in north County Dublin is easy to mistake for an ordinary feature of the agricultural landscape.

It is not. This earthwork at Kitchenstown is among the largest of the probable barrows, the term for a burial mound, within what appears to be an extensive prehistoric cemetery spread across a saddle-backed ridge. At roughly twelve and a half metres in diameter and standing some two metres high, it holds its own presence in the landscape, even if that presence has been slowly worn down over the centuries.

The site was noted and categorised by Keeling in 1983, who identified it as Site V within the wider cemetery grouping. It sits on the northern slope of the ridge, approximately fifty-two metres north-east of a neighbouring barrow and positioned slightly downslope from it, suggesting that whoever chose these locations was working within a deliberate spatial logic across the hillside. The northern section of the flat top has suffered erosion and disturbance from livestock, which is a common fate for low earthworks in fields that have been continuously grazed. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and later updated by Christine Baker, with the site entry dating to October 2014.

The mound is under pasture and overgrown with gorse, the dense spiny shrub that colonises disturbed and unmanaged ground across Ireland, and rabbit burrowing has added its own layer of disturbance to the surface. Anyone visiting should expect rough underfoot conditions and limited visibility through the gorse, particularly in late summer when the vegetation is at its thickest. The ridge setting does give the location a certain openness in terms of wider views, and the relationship between this mound and its recorded neighbour nearby is worth considering on the ground, even if neither is dramatically visible from a distance. Access, as with most monuments in private farmland, would require appropriate permissions and should be approached with that in mind.

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