Mound, Curragh, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Curragh, Co. Kildare

Somewhere on the flat, open expanse of the Curragh, a stretch of short-grazed grassland in Co. Kildare long associated with military training and horse racing, there sits a barely perceptible rise in the ground. It is easy to dismiss as a trick of the light or a quirk of the terrain, but measured carefully it reveals itself as a deliberate, if now very modest, earthen mound.

The mound sits on a low, narrow ridge running east to west, and is roughly subcircular in plan. Its base measures approximately 7.3 metres north to south and 6.6 metres east to west, narrowing to a flatter upper surface of around 5 metres by 4 metres. At its highest point it rises no more than 0.4 metres above the surrounding ground, and in places barely 0.1 metres. What makes it slightly more legible as a human construction is the disturbance visible on its upper surface, where a hollow roughly 2.2 metres long, 1.2 metres wide, and 0.2 metres deep has been dug out, suggesting that someone at some point investigated it, or robbed material from it. The mound was identified from aerial photography taken in 1999, which often reveals such subtle earthworks more clearly than a ground-level visit ever could, particularly on open, unploughed grassland like the Curragh where there are few modern intrusions to obscure the underlying archaeology.

Earthen mounds of this general type can represent a wide range of things, from prehistoric burial monuments to more recent landscape features, and without excavation it is difficult to assign this one a confident date or function. Its small size and poor state of preservation make interpretation cautious work. It is the kind of site that rewards patience with uncertainty, a slight irregularity in a landscape that has seen continuous human use for millennia.

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Pete F
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