Mound, Feltrim, Co. Dublin

Co. Dublin |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Feltrim, Co. Dublin

Somewhere in the landscape north of Dublin, a prehistoric mound once rose from the ground near Feltrim, known locally by the old Irish diminutive name 'Curkeen'.

It no longer exists. In the 1940s it was bulldozed, and with it went whatever structural evidence remained of its original form and purpose. What survives in the record is fragmentary: considerable quantities of human bone were recovered from the site, suggesting the mound had served at some point as a place of burial, though whether it was a Bronze Age barrow, an early medieval burial mound, or something else entirely cannot now be determined with any certainty.

The name 'Curkeen' is likely a diminutive of the Irish 'corca' or a related term, the kind of informal local place-name that often preserves a folk memory of something that official maps and records overlooked or misidentified. The destruction of the mound in the 1940s was not unusual for the period; land improvement schemes, agricultural machinery, and a general lack of legislative protection meant that many earthworks across Ireland were levelled during the mid-twentieth century, often before any meaningful archaeological investigation could take place. The human bone collected from the Feltrim site was noted by Flanagan in 1984, a publication that represents one of the few surviving references to the monument's existence at all.

The precise location of the Curkeen has since been lost. It is not that the site is difficult to access or seasonally obscured; it is simply that no one can now say with confidence exactly where it stood. The Feltrim area, lying between Swords and the Malahide estuary in north County Dublin, has been substantially altered by development over the decades since the mound's removal. For anyone interested in this kind of erasure, that ambiguity is itself the thing worth sitting with: a burial site that held human remains for perhaps thousands of years, known to local people by name, and now unlocatable on any map.

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Feltrim, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU03146

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