Ringfort (Cashel), Glasha More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
In a field in County Clare, three stone ringforts sit within roughly fifty metres of one another, close enough that their builders must have known each other well, or perhaps were the same people across generations.
The one on the slight rise at Glasha More is not the most immediately legible of the three, its walls reduced in places to a wide rubble spread, but what survives is quietly complex in ways that repay a closer look.
A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than an earthen bank, and this one at Glasha More is subcircular with an internal diameter of around twenty-four metres. Its double-faced wall, originally about two metres thick with a rubble core between two dressed stone faces, still shows two or three courses of the outer face in places, and the inner face can be traced across much of the circuit. On the south-southwest side, a further feature complicates the picture: a low revetted scarp running parallel to the cashel wall at a distance of about two metres. This may have functioned as an external skin or terrace, built to stabilise the cashel wall against the natural slope of the ground, a practical solution to a problem of gravity that the original builders apparently took seriously. Inside the enclosure, the northwest sector contains a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typical of early medieval settlement sites in Ireland, likely used for storage or refuge. The southeast sector holds something more affecting: a children's burial ground, a cillín, where infants and unbaptised children were interred in a practice that continued in rural Ireland well into the twentieth century. The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting that this landscape was being organised and worked across many different eras. Two further cashels lie to the south and southwest, and an enclosure sits roughly ninety-four metres to the east, making the immediate area one of unusual archaeological density even by Clare's well-populated standards.