Barrow (Ring Barrow), Curragh, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Barrows
On the flat, wind-scoured expanse of the Curragh in County Kildare, a stretch of open grassland better known for racehorses and military training than for prehistoric remains, a small earthwork sits quietly at the eastern end of a low ridge, almost imperceptible at ground level. This is a ring barrow, a type of funerary monument from prehistoric Ireland in which a central burial area is enclosed by a circular ditch and an outer earthen bank, the whole arrangement acting as a demarcated space set apart from the living world.
The monument is modest by any measure. The enclosed interior is roughly subcircular, spanning just over five metres east to west and five metres north to south. Around it runs a flat-bottomed fosse, the term for a shallow encircling ditch, between one and one point four metres wide and only fifteen centimetres deep. Beyond that lies a low external bank, two and a half to three and a half metres wide, which barely rises above the surrounding ground. What makes the layout slightly more legible is a deliberate break in the bank on the west-south-west side, an entrance gap nearly two and a half metres across, paired with a narrow causeway across the fosse beneath it. That pairing, gap and causeway together, suggests the monument was designed with a specific point of access in mind, a threshold rather than a sealed enclosure. The site came to wider notice through aerial photography carried out by the Department of Defence in 1999, which revealed its outline from above in a way that ground-level inspection alone would struggle to achieve.