Ringfort (Cashel), Glasha More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Glasha More, Co. Clare

What makes this cashel in Glasha More quietly peculiar is the way it seems to have been swallowed by the ground.

Set within a natural hollow in the limestone pastureland of County Clare, its concave interior sits roughly 1.5 metres below the surrounding outer ground level, giving the enclosure an almost sunken quality that is unusual even by the standards of Irish early medieval settlement. A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and this one is subcircular in plan, measuring just over 23 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south internally. The builders appear to have worked with the geology rather than against it, incorporating natural terraces in the limestone bedrock into the line of the wall on the north-west and south-east sides.

The enclosing wall is double-faced, meaning it has a dressed stone face on both its inner and outer sides, and survives to between two and three courses in height across much of its circuit, though the western stretch is buried under rubble and overgrowth. Several animal gaps have been cut through the wall at various points, the accumulated handiwork of generations of farming long after the cashel's original purpose had been forgotten. The site sits within a larger, multi-period field system, suggesting that this small area of Clare was being organised and worked across many centuries in succession. A second cashel lies approximately 59 metres to the west, hinting that this was once a more densely settled landscape than the quiet pastureland around it now implies. The site was first formally noted from aerial photography and added to the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 as a potential site, meaning its identification rested on cropmarks or earthwork shadows visible from the air rather than ground investigation at that point.

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