Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

On the Curragh of Kildare, that wide sweep of short-grazed limestone grassland more commonly associated with racehorses than prehistory, a ring barrow sits quietly beneath the open sky. The monument consists of a raised circular mound roughly nineteen metres across, ringed by a fosse, which is a cut ditch, and then by an outer earthen bank, bringing the total diameter to approximately twenty-nine metres. Ring barrows are funerary monuments of prehistoric date, typically Bronze Age, built to mark a burial beneath or within the central mound. The encircling ditch and bank are what distinguish them from simpler mounds, giving the whole structure a layered, concentric profile that reads clearly on the ground when conditions allow.

The site was recorded and described by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin in 1950, where it appeared as Site B in his study, accompanied by a scaled north-south section drawing. Ó Ríordáin was one of the foremost Irish archaeologists of the mid-twentieth century, and his systematic documentation of Curragh monuments brought a number of otherwise overlooked earthworks into the scholarly record. The Curragh itself is an unusual landscape, a rare surviving example of open commonage in the Irish midlands, and its dry, well-drained soils have helped preserve earthworks that might have been ploughed away elsewhere. This particular barrow has not escaped all modern interference, however. A trackway clips its eastern edge, partially overlying the outer bank on that side, a small but telling reminder of how gradually such monuments are worn down by the ordinary business of movement across land.

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