On a west-facing pasture slope in the grounds of Ballindoolin House, County Kildare, there sits an earthen mound that is unusual for a reason that has nothing to do with its age. The mound itself, circular and flat-topped, measures around eighteen metres across and rises only 1.6 metres from the surrounding ground. It is the kind of low, unassuming feature that might easily be walked past without a second thought. What gives it a particular character is the inscribed plaque fixed to its southern face, which reads: 'This ancient mound was enclosed and planted by Christopher Bor Esq. A.D. 1760.' Someone, more than two and a half centuries ago, felt strongly enough about this unremarkable rise in the ground to formally announce that they had done something about it.

The mound is retained by a low dry-stone wall, and a shallow outer fosse, a ditch typically dug around earthworks of this kind, runs along the south-west side, four to six metres wide but only ten to twenty centimetres deep at this point. What the mound actually represents in archaeological terms is not recorded; it may be prehistoric, or it may be something far more modest in origin. What is recorded is the eighteenth-century response to it. Christopher Bor, whoever he was, chose to treat this feature as something worth preserving and framing, enclosing and planting it as though setting a boundary between the ancient and the landscaped. The plaque is itself now a historical object, layering one era's sense of antiquity onto something older still. The mound today is overgrown, which gives it a slightly unkempt quality at odds with the formal gesture that plaque represents.