At Mullamast in County Kildare, there is almost nothing left to see, and that, in a way, is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. Beneath the surface of what is now agricultural land lies the ghost of a prehistoric barrow, a burial mound, that once measured an estimated forty metres across. Centuries of ploughing have reduced it to near-invisibility at ground level, leaving only faint traces that the human eye, standing in a field, would struggle to read at all.

The site survives most clearly not in stone or earth but in aerial photography, where the differential growth of crops or soil marks can betray buried structures that farming has otherwise erased. The barrow at Mullamast belongs to this category of place, its outline discernible from the air even as it vanishes from view on the ground. Mullamast itself is a place of some historical weight in the Kildare landscape, associated elsewhere with a inauguration site of the Kings of Leinster, which gives the surrounding area a broader significance that makes even an obliterated monument worth noting. The barrow's estimated diameter suggests it was once a substantial structure, large enough to have served as a conspicuous landmark in the prehistoric landscape before the long work of tillage slowly wore it down.