Ringfort (Rath), Windgap, Co. Waterford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Windgap, Co. Waterford

At the northern edge of a broad plateau in County Waterford, a ringfort sits quietly beneath a plantation of coniferous trees, its original entrance long obscured by growth. The earthwork is substantial: a subcircular platform roughly 39 metres east to west and 33.5 metres north to south, edged by a retaining wall still standing 1.3 metres high in places, with a fosse, or defensive ditch, cutting around the remainder. What makes this particular rath unusual is not its size or setting but what lies inside it, specifically an L-shaped souterrain in the northwest quadrant, now roofless and open to the sky, that once sheltered ogham stones of considerable age and scholarly interest.

A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge. This one runs eastward for about 6.2 metres before turning south for a further 6.2 metres, narrowing slightly as it does. Two lintels remain visible in the southern passage. A third, now displaced, carries an ogham inscription, the ancient Irish script carved as notched lines along a stone's edge, which the scholar R. A. S. Macalister read in 1945 as MODDAGN[I] MAQI GATTAGN[I] MUCOI LUGNI, a memorial formula naming an individual and his tribal lineage. Macalister had published an earlier account of the stones in 1909, and by that point he was already recording the loss of a second ogham stone, destroyed around 1890. The site was at one time described as an early church site by the Reverend P. Power in his study of Déise placenames, though this interpretation is now considered unlikely.

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