Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

On the Curragh, the vast open plain in County Kildare long associated with horse racing and military camps, a low mound sits quietly in the grass, considerably older than any of the activity that has surrounded it for centuries. It is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a central burial mound is encircled by a fosse, essentially a cut ditch, and an outer earthen bank. This particular example has a slightly domed central area measuring seventeen metres in diameter, with the fosse and external bank bringing the overall diameter out to twenty-nine metres.

The monument was documented by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose 1950 survey catalogued it as Site D and included a scaled north-to-south section drawing. Ring barrows are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though they continued in use into the early Iron Age, and their presence on the Curragh is a reminder that this flat expanse of limestone grassland was a significant landscape long before it became a centre of equestrian culture. One detail that complicates the monument's integrity is that a townland boundary bank, the kind of earthwork used to demarcate land divisions in the historic period, has been built directly over its eastern edge, an intrusion that illustrates how later generations simply absorbed older features into the working landscape without much ceremony.

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Pete F
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