placenamesBallintober
Baile an Tobair
Beyond the castle, Ballintober’s parish history can be followed through its nineteenth-century schools, a former classroom turned shop and a school reused as a community centre.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Baile an Tobair · Irish · main form
- Ballintober · English · main form
Place & story
A parish on the Suck
Lewis’s 1837 description places Ballintober parish on the River Suck and the Roscommon–Castlerea road. It included substantial bogland and a limestone quarry. Willsgrove, Enfield, French-dawn, Fortwilliam, Willsbrook and Tenny Park were its principal residences. The annual fair on 25 August dealt in horses; Lewis noted that it had formerly attracted yarn sellers too, preserving a trace of an earlier textile trade within a changing rural market. [2]
Willsgrove and the hedge schools
William R. Wills built the schoolhouse at Willsgrove and acted as its patron. Lewis counted about eighty boys and forty girls there, alongside two hedge schools teaching approximately 130 boys and forty girls. The Church of Ireland benefice joined Ballintober with Baslick and Kilkeevan, but its church and glebe-house stood in Kilkeevan. That wider ecclesiastical union should be distinguished from Ballintober’s own civil parish. [2]
A school becomes Daly’s shop
The former national school at Ballyfinegan, dating from around 1840, later served as a courthouse and then a shop. The heritage survey describes an early twentieth-century conversion into J. and C. Daly and Company’s grocery and drapery, with an added upper floor used for storage. Its surviving shopfront has display windows around a recessed entrance, while sash windows and a hipped slate roof preserve other elements of the building’s changing form. [3]
The school of 1929
Ballintober’s later national school was built in 1929 and subsequently became a community centre. Its single-storey plan places projecting bays on either side of a central gabled porch. Paired entrances, timber sash windows, stone steps and a slate roof remain part of its recorded fabric. The building sits back from the road within its own grounds, giving the former school a different setting from the earlier roadside premises. [4]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Roscommon
- Barony
- Castlereagh
- Coordinates
- 53.72617, -8.40124
- Mapped area
- 27.8 km²
- Logainm ID
- 2104 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Ballintober. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Ballintobber parish in A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) · Samuel Lewis
- J. and C. Daly and Company, registration 31815004 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- Ballintober National School, registration 31815003 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2021-10-29. How this page was prepared.