Enclosure, Glasha More, Co. Clare
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Enclosures
In a soggy field in County Clare, on a barely perceptible rise amid wet, rushy ground, sits a low earthwork so modest it is easy to mistake for a natural hummock or an old field boundary.
It is neither. The site at Glasha More is a small subcircular enclosure, roughly twelve metres across internally, defined by a bank that stands only ten to twenty centimetres above the interior surface and thirty to forty centimetres above the exterior. That is, at its most prominent, a feature not much taller than a house brick above the surrounding pasture. What makes it quietly puzzling is the combination of its shape, its multiple entrance gaps, and the uncertainty surrounding what it actually is.
The enclosure has three apparent entrance gaps, one to the north, one to the south, and a wider one opening to the west-southwest, measuring three metres across. Whether all of these are original breaks or later disturbances is unclear. The bank itself has been damaged along the southern, western, and northern stretches of the perimeter, which complicates any reading of the original circuit. A north-south field bank runs up against the eastern side, suggesting the monument was later incorporated into an agricultural landscape that did not entirely erase it. Surveyors have noted that the morphology is atypical, but the likeliest candidate for what this once was is a ringbarrow, a type of low funerary earthwork in which a roughly circular bank encloses a central area, often associated with Bronze Age burial traditions. The unusual number of entrance gaps and the subdued scale make this example difficult to classify with confidence.