Traces of an ancient manmade landscape reappear in County Meath

In 2019, following the glorious summer of 2018 during which I discovered Dronehenge close to Newgrange, the popular apps Google Earth and Apple Maps updated their satellite imagery of Ireland with photographs that had been taken from space during the 2018 drought.

In November of 2019, I scoured Google Earth and Apple Maps and discovered dozens of previously unrecorded manmade monuments and archaeological features from the past which were revealed in crop marks.

One extraordinary complex of monuments was revealed in drought imagery at a place called Curraghwalls in County Meath. Curraghwalls is a rural area, and the area in which it is situated is rich in tillage land. I realised in that period of discovery from 2018 through 2019 that wheat was the best crop in which to spot cropmarks, but barley in some cases also revealed subsurface remnants, especially in drought conditions.

However, cropmarks can become visible at other times, and not necessarily in drought conditions.

A bivallate ringfort and subrectangular enclosure at Curraghwalls. © Anthony Murphy

The satellite photos of the Curraghwalls complex taken in June-July 2018 reveal a highly complex assemblage of monuments which most likely represent the subsoil remnants of an early medieval farming and habitation landscape, consisting of ringforts, enclosures and field systems.

Although younger than Dronehenge by several millennia, the Curraghwalls complex is among my favourite discoveries, and represents one of the most impressive manmade early medieval landscapes I’ve seen.

The complex is situated on the eastern slope of a hill at Mannanstown, whose peak is 117 metres above sea level, located approximately halfway between the village of Duleek and the Fourknocks Neolithic complex of monuments.

I reported the complex to the National Monuments in late 2019, and some of the features were later recorded on their Historic Environment Viewer in February 2020. Principal among the finds was a bivallate ringfort measuring max. 38 metres in diameter. But as you can see from the 2019 satellite image, it’s a very busy series of conjoined and overlapping features which include other ringforts, subrectangular enclosures and field systems and drains.

Fast-forward to summer 2026. I’m quite sure the farmers of the Boyne Valley are delighted with the weather in recent months. A healthy mixture of rain and sunshine has resulted in crops that have ripened out nicely, with little or no signs of moisture stress. However, we aerial archaeologists are perhaps a tad underwhelmed, because there is much less chance of seeing previously unreported archaeology from the air in healthy crops!

Despite this, I put the drone in the air this week over the fields of Curraghwalls and was both surprised and delighted to see some signs of that complex medieval farming landscape in the wheat crop there. The bivallate ringfort was quite easy to spot, and a nearby subrectangular enclosure was also visible.

What’s particularly remarkable about Curraghwalls (and indeed other archaeological landscapes of the Leinster region) is the fact that agriculture has been ongoing in this area for centuries. In fact, if the Curraghwalls features conform to the expected dating for such monuments and archaeological remnants, we are probably looking at a farming landscape dating back to between a millennia and a millennia and a half ago.

One hallmark of Leinster’s hidden archaeology is that, being a rich tillage area, the land here has been continuously tilled for centuries, so that any above-surface embankments and raised features have long ago been ploughed flat. This is precisely why so many of these monuments have remained unknown to professional archaeologists in the modern era – they have no surface expression. What remains is beneath the surface, and in the absence of large-scale geophysical surveying, these features only reveal themselves in cropmarks.

So this week’s imagery is a nice surprise. My drone photographs of Curraghwalls demonstrate the need for continuous monitoring by aerial reconnaissance, and the value of ‘keeping an eye’ on these ancient landscapes, which can reveal themselves in circumstances outside of rare drought events.