Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

Somewhere on the Curragh plain, a Bronze Age burial mound sits ringed by three concentric earthen banks and two fosses, its ancient geometry quietly intact beneath a tangle of whins. What makes it unusual is not its age but its layering: the outermost banks are lower and narrower than those closer to the centre, a deliberate graduation that focuses attention inward, towards the slightly raised circular platform at the heart of the structure. That central area measures roughly twelve metres across, with the whole complex extending to approximately forty-five metres in overall diameter. A ring barrow of this kind is a funerary monument, typically dating to the Bronze Age, in which the burial itself sits within an enclosure formed by a fosse, a ditch dug to define and perhaps protect the sacred space, and one or more surrounding earthen banks. This example has three such banks, which places it at the more elaborate end of the type.

The monument was recorded and described by O'Riordáin in 1950, who noted the entrance gap at the southern side and produced a scaled cross-section running northwest to southeast. What O'Riordáin could not have anticipated, though the Curragh's long military history makes it less than surprising, is that a twentieth-century addition now occupies part of the site. A concrete pill-box, the kind of low defensive structure built to house a machine gun or observation post, has been inserted into the middle fosse at the southwest. The Curragh has been in continuous military use since at least the nineteenth century, and the plain's flat openness made it a natural location for training and, during periods of heightened security, for defensive installations. The result is a monument that carries two very different kinds of history within the same few metres of earth, one prehistoric and one modern, neither especially concerned with the other.

The site is heavily overgrown with whins, the spiny yellow-flowered shrub also known as gorse, which can make close inspection difficult. Anyone visiting should expect to work for their view of the earthworks rather than find them immediately legible from the ground.

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