Enclosure, Glasha More, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Glasha More, Co. Clare

What looks, at a glance, like a slightly raised ring in a rough Clare pasture turns out to be something considerably more layered.

At Glasha More, a subcircular enclosure sits on a low rise among undulating grassland and outcrops of the limestone pavement so characteristic of this part of County Clare. Its roughly oval interior measures about 25 metres north to south and just over 20 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone some five metres wide. The bank stands only a quarter of a metre above the interior but rises one to two metres on the outside, giving it a more imposing presence when viewed from without. Intermittent upright slabs along the inner edge may be the remnants of a wall-face or revetment, the kind of stone lining used to stabilise and retain an earthen bank. The interior is slightly concave and slopes gently toward the south-east, and a low mound sits at its south-south-eastern edge, its purpose not recorded.

The enclosure was considered significant enough to be marked by surveyors on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the six-inch edition of 1920, where it appears with the hachuring used to indicate earthworks in relief. An ancient trackway runs just outside it to the east, suggesting the site sat beside, rather than apart from, whatever movement and activity once shaped this landscape. The enclosure is embedded in a large multiperiod field system, meaning the land around it was divided, worked, and reworked across several different periods of occupation. That palimpsest quality is reinforced by what surrounds it: within roughly 115 metres in various directions lie at least four cashels, which are the dry-stone ringfort enclosures common across early medieval Ireland, typically associated with farming settlements and the management of livestock. Low piles of field-clearance rubble in the south-west of the interior are a more recent layer, the residue of generations of farmers lifting stone from the ground to make it workable, piling it at the margins just as their predecessors had done.

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