Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare

On the open grassland of the Curragh in County Kildare, a low circular earthwork sits on a south-facing slope, easily missed by anyone not already looking for it. This is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial mound or central area is defined by a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, with an earthen bank thrown up on the outer edge. The overall form here spans roughly 21 metres in diameter, enclosing a central disturbed area of approximately 14 metres across.

The site was recorded by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose 1950 survey catalogued it as Site N, complete with a scaled north-south cross-section. By the time of that documentation, the central area was already fairly disturbed, which is not unusual for monuments of this kind. The Curragh has been used for grazing, military training, and horse racing for centuries, and earthworks across the plain have suffered accordingly. Ring barrows as a class belong broadly to the Bronze Age, though they continued in use and were sometimes reused into the early medieval period. The defining feature, that combination of internal flat or mounded space, encircling fosse, and outer bank, distinguishes them from simpler mounds and suggests a deliberate separation of the burial space from the surrounding landscape, a zone set apart rather than merely raised above it.

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