County: Kildare Site name: Punchestown Great, Punchestown, Naas
Sites and Monuments Record No.: KD024-009 & KD024-036 Licence number: 23E0504
Author: Antoine Giacometti
Site type: Testing
Period/Dating: Post Medieval (AD 1600-AD 1750)
ITM: E 692009m, N 716583m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.191729, -6.623147
A desktop assessment, geophysical survey and test trenching programme were carried out on lands in Punchestown Great, Co. Kildare, in response to a Kildare County Council recommendation. The southern part of the site, where a new residence and wastewater treatment plant are proposed, is near the site of a seventeenth-century house (KD024-036). This is the former Punchestown House which appears to have been part of the Manor of Typer, granted in 1685 to John Alen or Allen, Viscount of Kildare. Prior to this the Manor had belonged to Sir Thomas Rawson, Knight, Prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, and there are documentary references to a castle, which may also have been located on the same site. No traces of the castle or house survive above the ground, but a series of ditched boundaries that are not aligned with the existing field system, and are instead set at a 35-45 degree angle from the current boundaries, were identified as the possible remains of the seventeenth-century estate landscape.
A standing stone (KD024-009) is located in a field to the southwest of the proposed development, and will not be impacted. The report concludes that no further archaeological work should be carried out in the northern field, but that archaeological monitoring of all groundworks in the southern field should be carried out using a metal detector.
Archaeology Plan, 32 Fitzwilliam Place Dublin 2
