At Windgap in County Waterford, there is a feature in the landscape that carries a name suggesting one thing while almost certainly being something else entirely. The site is recorded as a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead and defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Yet for a long time it was identified, at least in print, as an early church site, a designation that implies a very different kind of past.

The misidentification was advanced by Patrick Power in his 1952 work on the placenames of the Decies, the ancient territory that covered much of County Waterford. Power's research into local placenames was substantial, and the name Windgap itself, or the area around it, apparently led him to associate the site with ecclesiastical origins. However, that reading is now considered unlikely. A rath and an early church site are not easily confused in the archaeological record; the structural evidence, the finds assemblages, and the spatial logic of each tend to differ considerably. What seems to have happened here is that a placename, or perhaps a folk memory attached to the ground, shaped an interpretation that the physical remains do not support. It is a reminder that names are powerful things, capable of bending how we see what is in front of us, and that the landscape of early medieval Ireland is full of earthworks whose true function took generations of scholarship to properly sort out.