Ringfort (Cashel), Glasha Beg, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What makes this particular enclosure quietly arresting is not any single dramatic feature but rather what surrounds it: two other cashels within a hundred metres, a relict field system still legible in the landscape, and a cluster of associated features compressed into a small area of coarse pasture in County Clare.
Together they suggest not an isolated farmstead but something closer to a small early medieval settlement, or at least a corner of countryside that was once considerably busier than it appears today.
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the term used in Irish archaeology for enclosures whose boundaries were defined by dry-stone construction rather than earthen banks. The example at Glasha Beg is roughly subrectangular in plan, measuring approximately 24.5 metres northwest to southeast and 20.5 metres northeast to southwest internally. It survives now as a low platform, between 0.35 and 1.1 metres in height, with a few stone uprights at the southwest hinting at the original stone revetment, the facing wall that would once have given the enclosure a more defined edge. Along the southeast side, several lengths of a single course of this revetting are still visible, though the northwest has been nearly scraped away entirely, most likely by agricultural activity. Inside, a house site occupies the centre of the enclosure, and to its northeast are the remains of a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that in early medieval Ireland typically served for storage or concealment. A circular depression about 3.5 metres in diameter sits just outside the enclosure to the southeast, and a possible hut site lies roughly 23 metres to the south-southeast. The site was noted on Robinson's map of 1977 and sits within both a local relict field system and a broader multiperiod field system, suggesting layers of land use extending well beyond any single period.
The wider setting is worth noting for anyone approaching the site. Limestone paving is visible to the north, a reminder that this is Burren country, where the underlying karst geology shapes both the land surface and the character of the archaeology. The two neighbouring cashels, one about 73 metres to the northwest and another roughly 96 metres to the north-northeast, are close enough that all three would have been visible to one another, which raises questions about whether they were occupied simultaneously or represent successive phases of settlement across the same agricultural territory.