Ringfort (Cashel), Glasha More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
In a field in County Clare, the ground itself seems to be working against easy interpretation.
Limestone pavement breaks through the pasture, cattle gaps interrupt what was once a continuous defensive wall, and piles of field-clearance rubble sit against the interior of what survives of an early medieval enclosure. The structure reads now more as a boundary absorbed into the working landscape than as anything ceremonially preserved, yet its outline, nearly subcircular and roughly 26 by 25 metres across, still holds.
This is a cashel, a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, a construction type common across the west of Ireland from the early medieval period onward. The collapsed drystone wall that defines it is substantial in places, between three and six metres wide, though it barely protrudes above ground level on the interior side. On the southern exterior, several courses of the original outer wall-face remain visible, giving a better sense of what the structure once looked like when standing to its full height. The cashel was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map of 1897 and again on the 6-inch edition of 1920, suggesting it was a recognisable feature of the landscape well into the modern period. Writing in 1905, the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted the possible presence of a souterrain within the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge. No visible trace of it has since been confirmed on the ground. The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the land around it has been divided, worked, and reworked across many centuries. A second cashel lies about 59 metres to the east, and a further enclosure sits roughly 114 metres to the west-southwest, which suggests this was once a more densely organised agricultural and domestic landscape than the quiet pasture visible today would suggest.