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Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!
You asked for suggestions of Irish place names using the word "Ruadh" and meaning something like "Red Lake Fort".
In a previous letter, we suggested the name "Dún Locha Ruaidh" (where "ú" represents a 'u' with a sharp accent), which means "Red Lake Fort" or "Fort of the Red Lake". We also noted that this is not a likely medieval Irish place name, since it is unusual to find "dún" modified by more than one word in a place name and it is also unusual to find "dún" associated with a body of water. Most Irish place-names we found describe the place itself, not where it is. A fort on the shore of a reddish lake would more likely be something like "Shore Fort" than "Red Lake Fort."
You asked about different word orders, "Red Lake Fort" vs. "Fort of Red Lake". In Irish, this distinction is meaningless. English uses word order to imply relations between words. In the name "Red Lake Fort", the relationship between the lake and the fort is conveyed by word order. In the name "Fort of Red Lake", the same relationship is conveyed by the preposition "of". Word order does not carry grammatical meaning in Irish in the way that it does in English: Irish is an inflected language, in which the grammatical form of a word is used to convey these relationships: "Locha Ruaidh" means "of Red Fort", no matter where it appears in the phrase. In theory, the word order could be changed to "Locha Ruaidh Dún", and the meaning of the phrase would be exactly the same. In practice, we have observed that the modifying phrase comes after the substantive noun in Irish, so the standard form is "D/un Locha Ruaidh".
You wrote that it is most important to you to retain the spelling "Ruadh" rather than the meaning of the name. That can be done as long as the adjective "Ruadh" modifies the substantive word in the name: "Red Fort" or "Red Lake", rather than "Red Lake Fort". The correct translation of "Red Fort" is "Dún Ruadh" and "Red Lake" is "Loch Ruadh". Either of these names would be an excellent choice, since both are typical of medieval Irish place-naming.
These names are pronounced slightly differently in early-period and late-period Irish. In early Irish, they are roughly \doon ROO-ath\ and \lokh ROO-ath\ respectively, where \kh\ represents the hard rasping 'ch' sound in the normal Scottish pronunication of "loch" or the German "ach", and \th\ represents the 'th' sound in "this". In late-period Irish, the word "Ruadh" is pronounced roughly \ROO-ah\.
I hope this letter has been helpful. Tangwystyl ferch Morgant Glasfryn, Effric neyn Kenyeoch, and Talan Gwynek contributed to this letter.
For the Academy,
Arval Benicoeur