Puntbaun, Cappacur, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

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Puntbaun, Cappacur, Co. Galway

The name gives it away, if you know to ask.

"Puntbaun" is a Hiberno-English rendering of the Irish for a white pound, specifically a white cattle pound, and the whiteness in question is not a painted wall or pale limestone but a seasonal carpet of daisies that once covered the surrounding field every spring, before artificial fertilisers changed the soil chemistry and the daisies disappeared. That particular detail, passed down through local memory, lends an oddly domestic quality to what is otherwise a fairly battered piece of ancient landscape.

The site itself is a roughly D-shaped enclosure set in level grassland near Cappacur, measuring around 87 metres east to west and 70 metres north to south. Its perimeter is formed by a stone-faced earthen bank, the kind of construction that would once have defined a farmstead or a managed pastoral enclosure, and an external fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, survives along the southern and western arc from the south-south-east around to the west. Inside and radiating outward from the main enclosing bank are a series of smaller earth and stone banks, suggesting the interior was subdivided, perhaps for the separation and management of livestock, which is consistent with the place-name tradition. Attached to the monument at the south-east corner is a small circular annexe roughly 20 metres in diameter, its purpose unrecorded but its neat form suggesting deliberate addition rather than accidental survival. Quarrying has eaten into the north-western edge, which accounts for the "poorly preserved" character of that portion, though the southern and western sections retain enough definition to read the original layout with patience.

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