The summit of Mullamast Hill in County Kildare carries the remnants of an unusually dense cluster of ancient monuments, most of them in various states of erasure. A cemetery of five barrows, the large mounded burial cairns associated with prehistoric funerary practice, once occupied the highest ground here alongside two ringforts, a standing stone, and at least two further structures now entirely gone. Of the barrows, one has been badly damaged by quarrying, another survives only as a ploughed-down swelling in the ground estimated at around twenty-five metres in diameter, and a third has been reduced to a dumping site. Two more have left no visible trace at all on the surface.

The disappearance of those last two barrows is where the history of this place becomes unexpectedly entangled with nineteenth-century politics. According to a local account by Fitzgerald, published in the Journal of the Kildare Archaeological Society in the 1890s, the two mounds were deliberately levelled in preparation for one of Daniel O'Connell's so-called monster meetings of 1843, mass outdoor gatherings organised to press for the repeal of the Act of Union. Mullamast was a resonant choice of venue; the hill was already associated with a notorious sixteenth-century massacre of Leinster chieftains. During the levelling work, labourers uncovered a cist, a small stone-lined burial box of the kind typically associated with Bronze Age interments. The two other structures recorded near the standing stone were illustrated in Richard Gough's 1789 edition of Camden's Britannia, described there as a circle of small tumuli each about four feet high, but neither survives today and their precise positions are no longer known.