In Irish, the town is Béal Átha Ragad, meaning roughly "Ragget's ford" or "ford-mouth", and that etymology points directly to a crossing point on the River Nore that preceded the town itself, a wide, shallow stretch of water to the west where travellers and cattle could wade across before any bridge was thought of.

The personal name embedded in the toponym belongs to Richard le Ragged, an Anglo-Norman settler who, according to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, held lands near the church or chapel of Tulachbarri as early as 1220. Those lands are almost certainly the ground on which the present town now stands. The ford, then, was not merely a convenient river crossing; it was the reason anyone settled here at all, a fixed point in the landscape around which a community gradually organised itself. In time, as was common across medieval Ireland, the practicalities of a bridge replaced the inconvenience of wading, and the ford slipped out of use and eventually out of memory, leaving only the place-name as evidence that it ever existed.