Enclosure, Curragh, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Curragh, Co. Kildare

On the open grassland of the Curragh in County Kildare, a shallow rectangular depression sits almost unnoticed on a south-facing slope. It measures roughly six metres east to west and just over three metres across, with a depth that barely reaches half a metre at its deepest point. What makes it worth a second look is not its scale but its context: this small earthwork sits at the southern end of a linear chain of nine possible barrows, prehistoric burial mounds that run in a loose line across the ground. The depression itself is defined by a counterscarp, a low outer bank used to sharpen the profile of an earthwork, running along its eastern, northern, and western sides, with a narrow earthen bank along the south.

The Curragh has long been known as a landscape layered with early remains, and this modest feature is one of several outliers that complicate the otherwise tidy geometry of the barrow group. It sits roughly ten metres off the main alignment, nudged to the northeast, placing it in a slightly ambiguous relationship with its neighbours. The full cluster runs from this southern outlier to a second one at the northern end, with seven further possible barrows between them. The feature was identified from aerial photography taken in 1999 by the Department of Defence, which remains one of the more useful tools for picking out low-relief earthworks on open ground where shadow and crop conditions can reveal things invisible at ground level.

The eastern edge of the enclosure has been disturbed by livestock movement and vehicle tracks, and whin, the dense, thorny scrub also known as gorse, has begun to spread in from the western side. Both pressures are common on the Curragh, where the thin soils and open grazing that helped preserve so many early features also leave them exposed to gradual erosion and encroachment.

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Pete F
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