Strongbow's Cap, Ramstown, Co. Wexford

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Military Buildings

Strongbow’s Cap, Ramstown, Co. Wexford

On the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a feature on Baginbun Head in County Wexford is labelled, in gothic lettering, as "Strongbow's Cap".

The name is almost certainly a cartographic slip for "Strongbow's Camp", but the error has a certain accidental poetry to it, attaching a piece of headgear to one of the most consequential landings in Irish history and quietly lodging itself on the landscape ever since.

Baginbun Head is a broad promontory on the Wexford coast, roughly 400 metres along its longest axis and rising to about 20 metres. In the summer of 1170 it became the forward base of Raymond le Gros, an advance commander sent ahead by Richard de Clare FitzGilbert, the Anglo-Norman magnate better known as Strongbow. Raymond arrived with ten knights and seventy archers and encamped between May and August at a place the Irish sources call Dundunnolf, or Dún Domhnail, a name the historian G. H. Orpen, writing in 1898, associated with the promontory fort at the eastern end of the headland. During that wait, Raymond threw up a pair of linear earthen banks running roughly east-west across the headland, enclosing about 22 acres, apparently in preparation for a much larger force. He also defeated a substantial army sent against him from Waterford, and seventy leading citizens of that city were afterwards held captive at the camp before being thrown into the sea. When Strongbow finally came, however, he bypassed Baginbun entirely. He arrived with 200 knights and around a thousand others, landed at Crook in the Waterford estuary, and marched directly to take Waterford city. The carefully prepared encampment was never used for its intended purpose. A stone associated with the site, known as the Baginbun stone and found on a cliff-top roughly 340 metres north of the earthworks, has since been removed to a nearby house. Archaeological testing carried out in 2010 by Martin Byrne immediately north of the western end of the earthworks produced no material directly related to the Norman encampment.

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