On the Curragh, where racehorses have been trained for centuries, a prehistoric burial monument has spent recent decades doing a convincing impression of a lunging ring. The site sits at the southern foot of a whin-covered slope, a small circular feature just 5.5 metres across, its surrounding fosse, the shallow, water-filled ditch that defines the interior, heavily churned by hooves. The ground is wet and poached from horses being schooled there in tight circles, which is precisely the kind of disturbance that makes the site so easy to misread.

A ring barrow is a low earthen burial monument, typically from the Bronze Age, consisting of a central mound or flat area enclosed by a ditch and an outer bank. Here, the outer bank is modest by any measure, rising only 0.2 metres on the interior face and no more than 0.6 metres on the exterior, and the fosse is shallow, between 0.2 and 0.3 metres deep. It is exactly this combination, a circular form, disturbed ground, and minimal relief, that makes it so ambiguous. The surveyors who recorded it noted plainly that without the presence of that outer earthen bank, the feature could reasonably be dismissed as a modern construction. What seems most likely is that an already ancient and low-lying barrow was pressed into service as a convenient training circle, its circular form perfectly suited to the purpose. A second comparable site lies just 10 metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of the Curragh preserves at least a small cluster of these easily overlooked monuments. The site was confirmed from aerial photography taken in 1999 by the Department of Defence.